10DCAC,  Everyday Life

Day 4: Home

Where is “Home” to you? Is it where you grew up? Are you still there? Is it a childhood home, a region, a specific house or structure?

Or is it a completely new place that you’ve created on your own?

I find myself with two types of “home.” The first is my childhood home in eastern North Carolina. It’s a small crossroads in the middle of nowhere and in the middle of everything all at the same time. By errand standards, it’s not close to much, but by children’s standards it’s in the middle of all you need.

Home is where the dinner bell rang loud and clear to let my sisters and me know it was time to dust off and head back home for supper. (This might be miles away on a horse, in a fort in the woods, or in a friend’s backyard.)

Home is where the grey dust lived in literal puddles of dirt so fine that it would sweep around your bare feet in the middle of a dry summer. It’s where we’d hop in the back of a pickup truck to drive to the river to cool off after a hot day of playing and helping out a little bit in the garden. Home is the sight of our bird dog, Speck, watching to see which way we’d turn so he could follow us down to the store. (And where I told my father I used the blinker in our driveway so that Speck would know which way to go ahead of time.)

That’s my childhood home and it seems a little more magical through the layers of time.

Then there’s the home I’ve created with my husband, children, dogs and cats. This home is filled with laughter and love, fighting and making up, noise, hugs, jokes, puns, tears, games and lots and lots of talking. I hope my children begin to see layers of magic as they filtered through the years.

What does home look like to you? For me home looks like love wrapped inside a house.