Monday, October 03, 2022

When You Really Can't Go Home Again

 This is the home of my childhood.

My earliest memory of the house is walking through the back door, tugging on my Mom's hand, and imploring her to "Take me home", to which she replied "This is our home". And, my home it would be for the next fifty-two years of my life, despite having not lived in the house on a full time basis since I was eighteen.

That's the power of home; it waits for you.

This weekend, we said goodbye to the house and I wonder if it will miss us like we're going to miss it? Will it replay memories over and over in it's empty rooms like a reel of old home movies? Will it recall Barbie's first steps? My first lost tooth? The many first day of school photos taken on the front step? The holidays when far-flung family gathered together to celebrate over a roasted turkey and all the fix-ins? Will it recall the years that friends congregated on its lawn during the annual Stampede parades, or the crazy party that we threw for my High School graduation? If a house can hold memories; this house will have a million to choose from.

So many important things happened in that house. Hugh and I got engaged there on Christmas morning 1993, and, I left there for the church on our wedding day the following September. I brought my babies there when they were only days old and I watched as they and their cousins turned my parents into completely new animals; the Pod People were born in that house. Seriously, the spoilage they indulged those kids in there was next level.

We gathered together in that house the day we buried Dad.

Not just a house; a home. A home that I will miss, in a town that I felt privileged to have grown up in, with people who were-and are-my greatest blessings.

As Hugh and I drove into the valley that shelters the town that shelters the house that I grew up in; a rainbow formed. At the end of that rainbow is home. Always and forever. 






















No comments:

Post a Comment