Tiny Wonders: The Little House and the Home That Builds Us
On stories, Miranda Lambert, and the memories that make a home
Part of the Tiny Wonders series: short reflections on children’s books, faith, and everyday holiness.
Dear fellow wonderers,
A few weeks ago, my daughter found our old copy of The Little House (watch a read-aloud here), Virginia Lee Burton’s timeless picture book first published in 1942. It’s a copy my mom gave me, tucked away in the bottom drawer of a little dresser—one I always tell my kids is off-limits because it’s packed with beloved objects from when they were smaller, and a few treasures from when I was small, too. But somehow, she “found it” anyway.
When she pulled it out, I saw the blue and green scribbles she’d made across its pages years ago. I thought of reading it aloud to her when she was tiny, and how much she’s grown since then. I thought of my mother reading it aloud to me, and how those moments of shared wonder live on in us. So we took that moment—right there, plopped on the floor by the little dresser—to read it aloud together again and talk about our houses, old and new.
Burton’s story of a small pink house, once surrounded by quiet countryside before the city swallows it up, feels especially close these days. The springing up of gas stations, apartment complexes, and strip malls around our once in-the-middle-of-nowhere-Texas home reminds me of the Little House’s loneliness as it’s overtaken by the city’s rush. But what I love most is how the story ends: it’s the great-great-granddaughter of the man who first built the house who finds her, recognizes her sadness, and moves her back to the countryside where she belongs. As Burton writes:
“Never again would she be curious about the city… Never again would she want to live there… The stars twinkled above her… The new moon was coming up… It was Spring… And all was quiet and peaceful in the country.”
It’s such a heartfelt intergenerational story—a reminder of how our love for home, and the stories we tell each other, can be passed down through time.
I thought of all this the last time we drove by my childhood home in South Carolina. Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me” sprang to mind. Of course I had to play it and subject my family to it on our road trip. Every time I hear that song, my heart pangs and my eyes involuntarily well up with tears. (You can listen here, but I suggest you have tissues nearby.) I remember staring out the window during that visit, not recognizing the highways, the noises, the overgrowth of greenery, and the sprawl of big box suburbia that had overtaken the neighborhood where I once caught fireflies in the summer and walked our little black barrel of a family dog, Charley. Like Burton’s Little House, that old home—now missing the big tree I loved so much in the front yard—seemed almost hidden by the newness of what had been built around it. But I realized it wasn’t the house alone: it was the memories within it that made it home. Those stayed with me, and I recreated the tree for my family as I told them all about it and the time I fell right out of it.
We built the house where we live now with my daughter, but maybe, just maybe, like the home I grew up in, it’s building all of us, too, reminding us that holiness isn’t only found in cathedrals, but in the scribbles on old pages, the trees we climbed, and the homes that hold our stories, old and new.
What book or story has helped you see your home—or your memories of home—in a new light? And what house built you, or what memories make a place feel like home to you?
In hope and holy curiosity,
LuElla