I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago for 5 Minutes for Parenting. I forgot to link it here that day, but it seems a perfect reflection for this week. Hope y'all enjoy it.
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This Is Home
As I sit at my desk in the stillness of this Sunday night after a busy, active weekend for our family, I imagine the front of our home as a sleepy, peaceful face, her blinds half-closed like drooping eyelids, her walkway tossed lazily across the front lawn, an arm across a chest slowly rising and falling in gentle, untroubled slumber.
This summer marked our fourth here in Illinois and in our house. I remember the first summer, one of new everything. In each day of that summer we learned something new about the Midwest, about our little prairie town, about the families living to this side, to that side, across, and across and up two, down one, and we learned about this house. I remember how the sun shone so brightly through the kitchen windows those first few mornings that we all had to sit on one side of the table to eat breakfast until we got a window treatment for the back door. I remember the first daybreak I took my coffee out to the front porch and sat and watched the neighborhood come to life, one family at a time.
Back then everything was glaringly bright and new and we compared it all to our old lives, our old house, "back home." This new house and all that surrounded it were strange to us, different, not quite awkward, but noticeably stiff and unworn, like back-to-school blue jeans or a book just creaking open for the first time.
But that summer brought a brilliant fall, and fall the long, deep, oddly fortifying winter, and winter the radiant, redeeming spring and then another warm, lively summer, and as the seasons danced in and out, the simple, beautiful, remarkably predictable rhythms and patterns of days, weeks, months and years as a family, as dwellers in this house, as neighbors and friends of these families, as part of this warm and caring community, have weathered and softened and smoothed our transplanted lives and taught us how to belong here, to compare nothing now to a home that's somewhere else, for our home surrounds us here.
Our lives gladly flow with the rhythms and patterns of this place and these people and these seasons, and this house — this warm, welcoming stone-fronted cottage proudly wearing a fall wreath on her blue front door like a cherished brooch she's saved for a special occasion — is no longer lumber and glass and aluminum and steel stacked over and around us. Now she breathes in and out with the lives of the people in and around her and she holds herself softly to us like a proud and loving grandmother.
She's peacefully resting this night, as the children dream and my husband and I wind down the day in quiet togetherness. We are safe at home under her roof.
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This Is Home
As I sit at my desk in the stillness of this Sunday night after a busy, active weekend for our family, I imagine the front of our home as a sleepy, peaceful face, her blinds half-closed like drooping eyelids, her walkway tossed lazily across the front lawn, an arm across a chest slowly rising and falling in gentle, untroubled slumber.
This summer marked our fourth here in Illinois and in our house. I remember the first summer, one of new everything. In each day of that summer we learned something new about the Midwest, about our little prairie town, about the families living to this side, to that side, across, and across and up two, down one, and we learned about this house. I remember how the sun shone so brightly through the kitchen windows those first few mornings that we all had to sit on one side of the table to eat breakfast until we got a window treatment for the back door. I remember the first daybreak I took my coffee out to the front porch and sat and watched the neighborhood come to life, one family at a time.
Back then everything was glaringly bright and new and we compared it all to our old lives, our old house, "back home." This new house and all that surrounded it were strange to us, different, not quite awkward, but noticeably stiff and unworn, like back-to-school blue jeans or a book just creaking open for the first time.
But that summer brought a brilliant fall, and fall the long, deep, oddly fortifying winter, and winter the radiant, redeeming spring and then another warm, lively summer, and as the seasons danced in and out, the simple, beautiful, remarkably predictable rhythms and patterns of days, weeks, months and years as a family, as dwellers in this house, as neighbors and friends of these families, as part of this warm and caring community, have weathered and softened and smoothed our transplanted lives and taught us how to belong here, to compare nothing now to a home that's somewhere else, for our home surrounds us here.
Our lives gladly flow with the rhythms and patterns of this place and these people and these seasons, and this house — this warm, welcoming stone-fronted cottage proudly wearing a fall wreath on her blue front door like a cherished brooch she's saved for a special occasion — is no longer lumber and glass and aluminum and steel stacked over and around us. Now she breathes in and out with the lives of the people in and around her and she holds herself softly to us like a proud and loving grandmother.
She's peacefully resting this night, as the children dream and my husband and I wind down the day in quiet togetherness. We are safe at home under her roof.
