Not everybody has one–this place called “home.” Not the place where you hang your hat and sleep, not even the place where you create your Christmas traditions and bring your babies home to. I mean the place you grew up, the place where your parents still live and work and sleep within the same walls, to the same routines, that they did when you were a child.
In this mobile day and age, not many people have that.
And that makes it so much more precious, knowing that I do.
It’s the warm gold of ripening soybeans threaded with emerald, glowing softly below a steel-gray sky.
It’s the tranquil fuzziness of the pond that reflected all my nightly celestial wanderings.
It’s the comfort of knowing, in a world constantly shifting, that some things never change: the same hulking behemoth in red, visible from half a mile away, needing work, as always. Being coaxed back to life, as always, by a man wearing the same blue snap shirts, the same jeans and the same suspenders as always.
It’s Grandpa and forklifts and tractors.
It’s visits with distant aunts (mine) who give wheelbarrow rides.
It’s piles of dust and dirt that attract tiny bottoms with some magical, unstoppable magnetic force.
It’s the realization that in a world of insider trading and Senate seats bought and sold, the dirtiest work is sometimes the cleanest.
Linked to On, In and Around Mondays…
Kathleen M. Basi 
Makes me miss mine.
I was oddly nostalgic a few weeks ago when my dad told me that he took my sister and my bunkbed apart to turn our old room into a guest room. I had been bugging them to convert the room for years, but never thought about the fact that the bunkbeds (which I hated growing up) would have to go to make room for a full sized bed.
As an aside, if he wants to get rid of bunkbeds, we’re looking for some! 🙂
Shoot! He took them apart and used the wood from them to build more bookshelves for my mom!
I am so glad that both my husband and I have places like this to take our kids to. Places that life slows down and life takes us back to when we were young.
I love this post. No one in my family lives where we grew up anymore, and I do miss it. Home is here now, but something is lost, as you so well illustrate. That aunt sure is a good sport with the wheelbarrow rides!
Yes! It makes me miss my home 🙂
It’s the comfort of knowing… red…
Yes, and children’s sweet eyes and the machines that till and the season.
loved your post no matter how far away we go I will still have a home to go back to in a little rural town where my family has lived for generations
I LOVE this post! We are blessed to still have this amazing place called HOME. Back on the farm. Only our ‘hulking behemoth’ is green! 😉
I’ve never felt “home” attached to a building or specific place. We moved too often for that. I do connect it with a certain part of the country, which my kids have not really experienced.
You are fortunate.
Gloria
Counting along with you … As always, a delight to splash in thankfulness all around.
Splashin,
Sara