Home

Where is your home?

Mine is wherever my family is.  

Tommy and I were talking today about how many times we have moved.  I would have to stop and count, but let me just say....it has been a lot!  We were saying that wherever we go we try to make it ours.  A place where we feel content and safe and happy.  Even if we are staying in a hotel room, we don't trash it.  In fact, many times it is cleaner when we leave than when we got there.

At Christmas, we rented an apartment in NYC.  We had never met this young family, but we tried to treat it as if it were ours.  Again, we left it spotless.

When we were living in a tent in the desert in Mexico, I got up every morning around 5 (when the rooster crowed....literally!) and made my "bed".  When I climbed in at night, I wanted it to look inviting.  I even found a little strap on the inside of the tent right above the bed, where I hung my glasses each night.  Home.

It doesn't take much to walk outside, wherever you are, and find a flower or a pinecone or just some weeds and rocks, to decorate your table.  Even on a picnic, I take flowers for the table.  (ask Cindy Bates.)

As Tommy and I were talking we were at the trailer.  We had just come back from being in Florida for 2 weeks...another "home."  As I turned away from talking, I glanced at a poem I had hanging in the hallway right beside the door.  This trailer is, sadly, on it's last legs.  We bought it in 1984 so we know we are going to have to have it hauled away in the not too distant future.  I took the poem off the wall and read it to Tommy.  This poem says it all:

ON LEAVING

Take down the curtains, lock the door
And give the key to some one new;
I'll see the jonquil buds once more
And turn my back and go with you.

For little gardens everywhere
Quicken to a loving hand,
And little houses just as fair
Hug the highways of the land.

But there is only one of you
To satisfy my spirit's need,
And home is anywhere we two
Shall find a house and plant a seed.

- H.R. Roberts