Oikos

By Charles Houston

First Some Yogurt

You’ve probably seen the yogurt brands Yoplait, Siggis and Chobani. French, Icelandic and Icelandic, right? Wrong. These labels were just invented as marketing constructs and the words mean nothing.

Not so with my favorite yogurt, Oikos. Give credit to its producer, a huge French food products company, for using an actual and appropriate Greek word: Oikos, which means “home.”

Yogurt has no special relevance for rural Loudoun, but oikos is the reason so many of us work hard to protect what we have here. The countryside, the mountains and forests, the villages and country roads and farms are collectively our home. Our oikos.

I never knew that word until I was given a buried treasure.

The Granite Slab

Last August we visited family in my hometown of Augusta, Georgia. While there, we passed my boyhood home and ran into the current owners, Greg and Susan. They took us on a tour of the house, many decades after I’d last seen it. Wow! It had been totally renovated and transformed to a fare-thee-well, yet it still brought pangs of memory.

As we walked around a terrace, Greg stopped, “Wait, I found something you might want.” He had been working in a flower bed and unearthed an engraved granite slab. On it were Greek letters that roughly read, “EN TOYTU OIKOS ATAPHTO.” Below that phrase were dates marking my parents’ 20^th year in the house, followed by each Houston’s carved initials.

Greg had had the Greek translated: “Our Beloved Home.”

A House is not a Home

I lived in my first house in Atlanta for two or three years. It was never home. My second house didn’t quite rise to “home” status, though I lived there fifteen years. Later, I was stuck in Arlington for four years and I was generally unhappy there. Obviously, it was never my “home.”

Then I moved here. Our place was first a small and scruffy farm to use on the weekends, but eventually I built a large addition and the place quickly became my permanent residence. It soon began to feel that it was my home.

How Did That Happen?

What conscious and unconscious factors made the place rise to oikos status? It brought peace and quiet, things foreign to me in Atlanta and Arlington. The unpaved road, the pastures and the view of the mountains were visually delightful. Passers-by would often just drop in and chat, and that was something new to me. 

I also took much pleasure with the house itself, which I had renovated and constructed to my precise taste. It was and has always been comfortable and attractive, and for the past 20 or so years has been full of good memories.

Thus, a pleasant location helps make a home. It helps if the house functions well and is aesthetically pleasing. A good family life is a big part of it. (I wonder if people in unhappy families ever consider their residence to be their homes. I also wonder if military children ever feel they have a true home, or even a hometown. An aside: A recent poll reports that only 22 percent of respondents consider their current abode to be their home.)

Location, Location, Location

That real estate bromide brings a focus to western Loudoun. Imagine a place that’s quaint as well as quiet, where there are more horses than people, where history runs deep, where neighborliness abounds and which is beautiful. 

This is also a place where one might know many blue-collar workers and many PhDs and many others in between. Imagine a place where you are welcomed and invited to participate in all manner of activities … to become part of a community. Many of us, even those originally from cities, also sense a deep-seated connection to an agrarian past that seems to be in our psyches.

We don’t have to imagine such a place; we live in one.

A Community of Complainers

Some Supervisors comment that western Loudouners make the great majority of complaints about land use issues and zoning. How could they be puzzled? Western Loudoun has vastly more undeveloped land than the rest of the county, so it is the biggest target for sprawl and commercialization. 

A more fundamental reason we complain is that for most of us, particularly those who’ve lived here a while, this is our home, and our sense of oikos is deep-rooted.

There are also statistical factors. Western Loudoun has an older and well-educated population. Many of us are retired from professional lives and have the time to weigh in on issues. 

Almost all of us have specifically chosen to move here for its history, ambience and community. This is not a transient place, from which we’d move back to Chicago or Boston or Augusta when children had finished school, but a place with permanence. 

Our Oikos

Psychologists, architects, philosophers and others have theorized endlessly about the true meaning of “home.” It’s a great concept to ponder, but it’s better simply to appreciate the beloved home that is western Loudoun and to defend it if we must.

In developing six million square feet of corporate office buildings around the south, Charles Houston dealt with a multitude of planners and politicians and their zoning codes. He lives in Paeonian Springs.