Home

I'm dreaming of home today. Strange, too, that at this minute, Pandora is playing "Home" by Jack Johnson as well. It's a slow song, not sad, somehow a happy melancholy little ditty. And that's exactly how I'm feeling (again?) today -- somehow happy yet melancholy.

Home -- it used to mean my little farm in the woods. I had a hard time leaving that home -- that home that I had almost totally rebuilt from the inside out, and poured every bit of my energy and heart and soul into -- even though leaving it behind meant starting a new home with my husband. The last time I left the farm -- only a  few weeks ago -- I'd never felt so relieved to get back home to our house in Cincy. It was oddly sad yet some how a relief to realize that. To realize that the house in the woods was no longer really my home -- at least not the home where everything was brilliantly familiar and warm and settled. The farm has this sense now of a home since passed -- still there, still chock full of good, good memories and pretty tokens that I still want in my life, but no longer the place where I can let everything go and truly relax. It's a place in transition now -- ready to become someone else's home, or one that I can only call my own during holidays.

In many ways, I still think of Kansas City as home -- but more in the sense of that's where my roots are. It's where I'm from. It's where I'll always be from, I think (originally, that is).  My sisters still live there; the farm and my parents are close -- that area will always be in the most literal sense, where everything began and therefore, home in that sense.

I dream too of the time when Colorado might be our home. It always seems just another two years away that we could find a new home out there in those clean mountains, where peaceful, giving, green living seem just a bit more important and easy and real than they do here. A new home where Grif could grow, and where Jim and I could live the next chapter of our lives as a couple, as a family. 

But home these days in my heart is so very much simply the boy and my pilot. I'm missing them both today. Missing that feeling of home when we are all together. The boy was not himself today either -- my only thought all morning was how I wished, wished so very hard, that I could have stayed home with him today. And although that might yet come true (daycare could call and homeward bound we would both be), I think it's more the fact that my responsibilities at my full-time job got in the way of staying home -- of being home -- with the not-so-sick boy who was just not acting like himself this morning.


Home -- I want to be home more. For both the boy and the pilot -- but for me too. Work and all things not "home" seem so much less important these days. I feel like if I could just be home more, everything would fall into place a little bit neater, a little bit easier, and more importantly, a little bit happier. And although I know that may not be entirely the truth, there's a small part of that that is true -- the hopefulness that comes with the ability to just be home more.

I'm thankful that I even have a home to call my own -- and a wonderful family and life in which to nurture and grow and love a home with. And I think our home is lovely -- located in a honestly great neighborhood with truly generous neighbors -- friends who've helped make it a good home for us and each other too. Because of all this, I have a happy place to come home to. To be home at. "So Damn Lucky" -- that's what's on Pandora now. Too, too true.

I miss home today -- and all that it entails, from farm to cities to boys and more -- home is where I want to be.