November 15, 2007

• Home Sweet Home

  

  Can’t sleep.   I have been thinking a lot lately about being away from home and what home means.  A recent discussion with a friend about the meaning of home has gotten me thinking about what it means to me.  Now I have been truly fortunate in my life.  I have never spent any appreciable time away from home.  I have lived all of my life in the same small approximate 40 mile area.  I have gone to schools, including college, worked, married and lived in this small area all of my 45 years.  This is not a complaint either.  I graduated from high school and went to college 30 minutes from home.  Had the good fortune to come home every other weekend to work.  Got married right out of college. (I actually quit school 3 weeks before graduation and got married shortly after that) and moved from school to the house you see pictured above.  Where I have lived for the last 24 1/2 years.  (hopefully I will be carried from this house and buried from here).

  So what is home? Is it a feeling, a place or an atmosphere one establishes?  That was the discussion.  My opinion is that it is some of all three.  Now I am not the thinker that my wise and sagelike son is so I am not capable of going deeply into the philosophy of home.  But in my long life I have experienced home in many forms.  To me home is where and what you love.  My husband and I recently experienced that when our barn burned down and we were all scattered around town (literally) living in many friend’s houses while ours was cleaned of the smoke smell.  Home was where we were all together.  The places didn’t necessarily matter.  One Sunday we were together at a local rec. center to bowl and play pool and simply spend time together as a family.  That was home for us, not by virtue of the place but by virtue of our togetherness and our renewal as a family.  When our own house was cleaned and we were able to again take up residence, it took time for it to feel like “home” to us because of the strangers that had been in it but it was still home to us because we were once again together and we were relieved to be a family and alone once more. 

  To me home is the pleasure of caring for my husband and children.  It is the meals that I put on the table and the clean laundry that I provide for them.  It is the “kissed” scrapes and the ear that I provide for the questions that they have.  Home is the vocation of motherhood and it requires no building to accomplish it.  But I surely do like the house that I provide that home in.

  • 12:59 am
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