Houses are Made of Dreams

What is it about a house that makes it so much the stuff of dreams?

I recently got back from a trip back to to the Midwest--Kansas City--on a search for investment houses in the there. Of course, I want to keep this house I plan to buy for personal use, possibly, too, in the future. This makes it a more difficult buy by far. So many qualities must go into a place that you might want to live. As in, how does the place make you feel? Is there air and light? Movement from room to room?

And each place, if one notices, has a certain smell...maybe old and musty, maybe of cheap new linoleum, maybe like the pine trees outside in the lawn.

And there are artists, such as Karyn Olson, whose work, left, draws on the house as a visual motif, drawing on our ancient sense of shelter, of sanctuary or emotional connection to place.

The best use of a house as a motif yet in literature has got to be in the novel The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, where the weight of this old house, tied down by ropes on an island in the wind finally is torn apart by the elements (both in mother nature and the forces within the family) that have whipped at it for decades.