Last night was like so many other recent nights; after sleeping for an hour or two, I woke up. I tried my usual remedies: I went to the bathroom, I took a melatonin, I tried two peanut butter cookies and a small glass of port.  I read my Kindle. I read a post from an old friend, a guy who stayed in my Wyoming hometown and made a success of himself. I got to thinking about home:

I’ve been back there a few times since leaving 52 years ago. It was not the town that I remember. The skeleton, the bones of the town were there of course but, things had changed. My high school was torn down, replaced by a rambling structure I had no affinity for. Streets of homes had been replaced by convenience stores and fast-food drive-ins. It was different and not the sweet prairie town I remembered.

A few years ago, I took my grown children with me on a visit. I wanted them to see where I’d grown, what place had shaped me, the backdrop for the stories I’d told them of my growing. They’d been familiar with Lydia’s hometown. They grew up there and we frequently drove past the house she grew up in. The kids and I took to calling it the “shrine” and “crossing” ourselves whenever it was mentioned or seen. I thought over the different houses I’d shown them, the hill I struggled to climb with my bike, the theater where I, being quite short, paid for a child’s ticket long after I was, by their standards, a child.

Eventually these ramblings let me drift off to sleep without dropping the Kindle. (I’ve destroyed three charging cords by repeatedly dropping the kindle when suddenly overtaken with sleep, bending the micro-usb. The fourth cord remains in only by absolute stillness. I’ve destroyed the charging port as well). It was nearly 5 o’clock when I woke again.

Holding a nearly cold cup of coffee, I lean on a bookcase looking out the front window. No birdsong. A cold thin mist drifts down our street. Near the telephone pole by our neighbors, ivy climbs up their mailbox, totally hiding it, like kudzu vines I’d seen in Louisiana. (The postman told me once that when he’d pulled the door open on the box a snake had crawled out.) No one about yet. I like what I see.

We all hold on to our childhood as it was, the place where we first started. Whether good or bad, it was our beginning place, our foundation. But, as I look out this morning, this home is really where I want to be. The place where I started changed. I am only a visitor there. So too, for Lydia, the shrine has changed. This is where we want to be.

Thursday will be Thanksgiving. We will have our son and his new wife to dinner. We will call our daughter and her family in the evening. This was once their home but, not anymore. They have their foundation and now have homes of their own. I hope that they will look back and think of this as a good place to have grown up.

This is home.

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