There's No Place Like Home

In a recent conversation with some friends, I mentioned that I love the house I live in but it doesn't seem like home. The couldn't understand, "because it's so awesome!" It is. It is an awesome house. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.

It's been two years, feels like it should be home by now. Don't get the wrong idea, I love the house. A lot. And, as my hobbies are puttering and tinkering, I love having a project at my fingertips at all times.

Bottled beer taste in a can.

I'm starting to think that it doesn't feel like home because 'home' is so much more than where you sleep. This past weekend I went 'home'. To where I was born. And spent most of my childhood. I went for a run on my favorite gravel road. I had a Keystone Light in The Pastime Tavern. Two actually. That my mom had to buy for me because they only take cash. And, I only carry plastic. Where some other 'kids' I grew up with were also hanging out for a beer on a hot summer night.

Is it that home is where your childhood memories are? That spot on the sidewalk you can point to where you fell and earned your first stitches? The old dirt road where you learned how to drive? How you got that scar on your forehead? Which is a post all on it's own...

I come from a small town. Very small. Where there is one pay phone. That makes local calls. For free. Where the road is clearly marked, 'Primitive Road. No warning signs.' Out in the dry alkali dirt. Dirt that feels like powder. A place that is so cold in the winter your nostrils freeze shut and so hot in the summer you can see the heat waves rise off the road and water evaporates before it hits the ground. It smells like wheat, dirt and grease. Heaven.

It's quiet and still and when it's dark you can see the stars. All of them.

Favorite road.

As I sat at a kitchen table with people who have known me my whole life, laughing and catching up over a couple cocktails, let's go with a couple... I got to thinking... this is it. This is home. This place is what made me who I am. The women at the kitchen table (and a couple others who weren't there) all had a hand in that. These women, my mother being one of them, to put it bluntly, get shit done. I've never thought I couldn't do anything I ever wanted to. Because the example I always had was that I could.

Home is where you become who you are, where you grow up. Literally and figuratively. There's no place like it. So says Dorothy.

I believe that where I sleep will be home to my children. This is where they'll become who they'll be. Where they'll sneak in late and make a lot of memories with their friends and our friends. Their home is a nice house in a nice neighborhood with sidewalks and a lawn with a sprinkler system. There are no rattle snakes to avoid and there's no worry that the house cat will be eaten by a coyote.

Their home is rather boring, I'm afraid.