First home. It’s a little house on the prairie or in the big woods. It’s a flower-laden cottage in the English countryside. With bunnies. It’s a Gilded Age grand slam on the coast of New England. It’s a tiki hut, well hidden, in a grove of bamboo along a river that runs to the sea, on the island of Kauai. (Three waterfalls crown the hanging valleys all around it.) It’s a castle in Scotland. A townhouse–in Paris, or Rome, or New York City.

It’s the first fort you built in the woods where you played all day without a helmet on, or a cell phone in your pocket, or a friend. You were all alone. It took you about three whistled and hummed versions of “Hey Jude” to ride your bike there. (The fat-tired junker from the town dump your dad fixed up. The bike had a fender, with a rack over it. You could stack and tie salvaged wood to the rack and haul it to your own building site in the forest. You took the wood from scattered piles of scrap around the construction sites of new homes that were popping up, like swarms of giddy grasshoppers, from the glacier-scraped flatlands of Indiana to form America’s newest suburban dreamvilles.)

Not yet ten years old–you staked out your fort’s foundation, leaned walls in on each other, and when you set the roof, your heart skipped a beat. You crawled inside and sat like a little buddha, all the world’s mysteries at rest inside the tranquil float of your newborn gypsy soul–the one you cleansed every Saturday morning in the confession stall at church. Where you told lies. Because you never kept track of your sins.

Gardens, you soon thought. Now that I have a home in the woods, I ought to tidy up the land around it and make everything look really nice. And you arranged rocks into nice rows, raked out the dirt, made little seats with logs.

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I was displaced–always on the lam for a  new home–throughout my life. From the time I was a baby until after college, I lived in about 13 different houses, in three disparate regions of America–the midwest, the southwest, and the northeast. I attended seven different schools from fifth grade through 12th grade.  “Did all that moving and all of those schools have an effect on you?” Someone once asked me.

Here’s one story about it: My parents, who had seven children, (the last one was born in Arizona), scrambled through the economic classes in the blink of a childhood–mine. Mom and Dad’s first house looked like the houses in the picture below which stand across the street from where our house was–now there’s just a vacant expanse of grass near a warehouse in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, where the ideals of home started for my family.

Mom and Dad bought a new house eventually. (But kept the first one as rental property–a key move for building wealth.) The new house wasn’t much bigger. Dad built a garage behind it. (Sweat equity.) They planted a little tree in the front yard. It’s the only big tree on the street growing in any front yard–still. That tree is the most regal thing we left behind. A good way to leave your mark!  “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” Martin Luther.

  Mom and Dad had more babies and bought another house. Mom began to design houses. She taught herself how to invest in real estate and the stock market. (Mom graduated from high school early, at 16, but never went to college.) Mom designed another house and they built it. The post-war boom years were losing steam. So Dad accepted a job opportunity in Mexico, just over the border from Arizona. Mom got her driver’s license and we all headed west in two station wagons. I’d been dreaming of becoming a hippie and going to California. But I ended up in the desert in Arizona. We lived, at first, in a house on a highway near the truck stop in the picture below. Pretty depressing. Then we moved to two apartments in a resort area–Mom, Dad and the littlest kids bunked down in one apartment. The older kids (including me) partied in the other. Mexican border+young kids in their own apartment+Led Zeppelin+late-night TV and poker games.  Mom and Dad built a nice house for all of us eventually, but our family was like the rest of the country–as the Vietnam War faded and Watergate ushered in many more “gates” to come–we were kind of dazed and confused. After almost three years, Mom and Dad abandoned Arizona and we headed east. We moved to a town on the Connecticut shoreline when I was sixteen. I got my own bedroom. I learned about LL Bean and bagels and jocks and college. I unraveled the experiences of loneliness, alienation, being uprooted–and I came to realize that it doesn’t matter if you’re a gypsy or if you came over on the Mayflower and established a compound where your family has lived forever–if you’re on the lam from yourself, and you never find a place to call home, life won’t ever be special.

Mom and Dad’s sweat equity helped all seven of their children end up in college. We were like every other family–the wars inside of each of us, got mixed up with the wars between each other, got mixed up with the wars from intruders and events beyond our household. But–no matter where we lived–Mom and Dad made our house a home. We kept our homes fixed up, we planted gardens, and we ate dinner together.

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A gypsy kid never forgets how cruddy it feels to be an outsider. When everything else is foreign to you, a home isn’t. It’s the one place where you can land and try to get it together and find someone to love. So, when I was approached, recently, by the Massachusetts Master Gardeners Outreach Coordinator and asked if I would consider volunteering as a garden designer for Habitat for Humanity, I didn’t even have to take a minute to think about it.

Habitat for Humanity was founded on, and remains devoted to, a non-denominational Christian housing ministry.  People with scant resources who desire to own their own home (such a sacred dream!) can apply for a home through Habitat for Humanity regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity.

Volunteers must support the organization’s mission statement: “Seeking to put God’s love into action, Habitat for Humanity brings people together to build homes, communities, and hope.”

Habitat for Humanity is not a give-away. Applicants agree to invest 500 hours of sweat equity into the building of their own homes and they agree to help build other homes or, if they are disabled, they agree to work in other, suitable capacities. They pay their own mortgage. And–this is where I get to be involved–the new homeowners need to learn how to keep their homes looking nice outside and how to take care of their property. If any of them would like to learn how to become gardeners, (and some have already expressed interest), we will coach them and encourage them to do that also.

The first garden I ever had was outside my apartment building in Boston. It was about the size of my childhood bed–where I passed many nights pretending that someday I would be rich and have a swimming pool. That dream ended when I became a camping girl and my dream house started to look like this lean-to in Vermont with a view to the Green Mountains: If you look closely, the lean-to has a desk and a bookshelf in it.

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Habitat for Humanity believes sweat equity can build decent housing and dignity, it can create stability for families, it leads to health, safety, and security in communities, and–it opens up job and educational opportunities. I believe in sweat equity, too. It’s the one resource you have, when you begin with nothing, that will transform your life and enrich your soul.

“We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community.” Dorothy Day.

Everyone needs a place where they can set their soul afloat. And what a dream-come-true it would be, if you could call that place, home.