Athen Sdrpc

When the children and I got into our Ford Pinto to leave, my two-year–old climbed into the backseat and announced emphatically, “I like those people. They have a nice warm!”
My toddler defined that day the threshold where wood, brick, and mortar are transformed into sacred space. A threshold is both a point of entry and a level above which something is true and below which it is not. A “nice warm” sensed upon entering someone’s home is not a matter of elaborate decor, parklike grounds, or gourmet cooking. It doesn’t take loads of time, energy, or money. Our friend Eva didn’t have those things. A “nice warm” starts with who you are, not with what you have. Engendered where your instinct for nesting meets your affection for other people, a “nice warm” is the threshold above which a house becomes a home.
If you wish to tap the enigma of what it means to emote a “nice warm,” start by finding the sacred play in every day—right where you are with what you have in your hands. After all, a child’s play is actually a child’s work, isn’t it? As a product of the 1950s and ‘60s, when domesticity reigned in my home, my personal amusement usually involved playing house wherever I found a bit of space and solitude. On a tree stump in the sun, I baked mud pies filled with grass and mud, sprinkled with pebbles. The best mud could be made by pouring a bucketful of water into the soil behind the garage and beside the alley. I let it soak and turned my attention to the hollyhocks growing around the garbage cans. My mother had taught me to make “ladies” of the blossoms—a large blossom for the skirt, a small one for the bodice, and a tiny one for the bonnet, all attached to the stem. These pink dolls decorated my tea table, a cardboard box where I later served mud concoctions to a three-year-old in briefs and cowboy boots. Soon my little brother was off again on his stick horse.