Home

My parent's home is filled with things; solid things filled with history and memory. My mother has spent a lifetime gathering them to her; an act of holding on in a world bent on speeding forward, as if through them she can bring back loved ones and simpler times. Perhaps it is from my mother that I have come by the notion that our homes matter: that the things we chose to fill them with reflect deeper parts of ourselves and our values.

Lance and I are in a time of home transition. We recently built a home, and are preparing to put our former home on the market.  It is a bittersweet season for me, closing this chapter of our life together, and opening the next. Though that house never quite fit me, like wearing clothing that just isn't "you", it captures a part of my heart as the first home we shared, the place we decorated our first nursery and brought all of our babies home to.  I did so much becoming in that house. I became a wife, a mother, a Christian, someone who feeds people. One day after another passed, and somehow I became a real grown up woman within those walls....walls that are now bare and small feeling, since the life within has moved forward.

It is a beautiful gift though, to be able to forge a life with the one you love; to breath life into a house and fill it with beautiful meaningful things.  Our home now doesn't feel like a building at all.  Every knob, light, color, and texture was chosen to reflect who we are.  They are mingled with our hopes for our family, so that the house feels like a physical manifestation of our love.

A part of my heart will always long for the farm that formed me as a girl, but Lance belongs here, so we had to create our own space and tradition.  I imagine with great anticipation long cricket filled summer evenings on the porch, long sweat filled days making our land a place of beauty and productivity; a rich space filled place where my children can grow, a placed pieced together like a mosaic of scavenged treasures, a place of deep nourishing roots, a place to come home to.