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A house is a house till love makes it a home; a place of warmth, family togetherness, and great memories. A home is a place with value and heart in every knot of an old wooden floor; every re-painted room, every scrape on a wall. All can be repaired or overhauled to fit the family's personal style. That house BECOMES a home the minute that happens.

Pictures of loved ones follow the banister up the stairs: there's great, great grandpa in his Civil War uniform; a family photo of the whole clan, back in the forties, Mom and Dad standing by their new car of the same year. There's grown daughter Sally at age 5, with a balloon stuck to the side of her hair, during a birthday party. A picture of Sally grown, holding her first child. These things, precious moments in a family's life, make a house a home.

One can have a large, elegant house, full of the fabulous, expensive furniture, a plasma TV, and other material possessions meant to impress, but without a family filled with memories good and bad, without mental and physical involvement in the way the house is treated, it is not a home, just a house.

When I first married, my husband and I moved to a cute, cozy-looking house that seemed like a good fit for us. The rooms were nice sizes, not too big, not too small, and it had a real fireplace with cozy hearth. But because my husband was given an assignment to better his job position, that had him in Illinois for three months, it was never a real home. It takes two people to create memories. Two people to have stories to tell their grand kids when they're old, two people to fill a space with love.

It wasn't until over fifteen years later that I finally had a home. It is the brand new home I live in now; lots of open space, nice sized rooms, but more than that, my husband's imprint with mine is everywhere; it's in the picture we have of his parents on their wedding day, antiques his mom gave us from an era when she was young. Throw pillows from places hubby and I have visited on vacations, and photos of family and friends.

There's my favorite picture of my brother, with his guitar, a Christmas greeting card of his whole family, and a picture of my baby niece in a pool, wearing her dad's sunglasses and a floppy hat.

In my office, there are my college degrees and poetry winning entries framed and on display. I am very proud of all of them, as they speak of all my hard work writing and creating art. Sometimes I think I am the only one who likes my poetry: each one tells a little

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