Are you a tenant or a resident? The words mean basically the same thing, but in my mind they seem different.

When the kids were small, we moved a lot. Rather than buy a house we rented. We were tenants. We lived in somebody else’s house, on their property, under their jurisdiction.

My husband had a rule of thumb. Always leave things better than when you found them. One time we borrowed his younger brother’s car while ours was in the shop. Before we returned it, he said, ‘We’re going to vacuum his car and wash it. Then we’ll fill it with gas before we take it back.’ He felt it so important to leave it better than when we got it.

This translated into the houses we rented. We always improved upon them any way we could. Putting in flower gardens, keeping everything swept and tidy, doing painting, deep cleaning, maintenance, yard care, anything we could do to make it better, and others noticed, including the landlord. We didn’t want to ‘live up’ to the name ‘renters’!

That was the difference in my opinion. A tenant was a ‘mere’ renter…living in somebody else’s place where the landlord did all the work. The tenant did nothing…maybe even was destructive to the place.

We were residents! We lived there, it was our home and we wanted to take good care of it like it was our very own! We were proud to live there and help keep it up. It was a true sense of ‘ownership’

How do you feel about this?