Home is Where the Crumbs Are

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Home has been a bit of a fluid concept for me the last few years… four moves in three years, hauling belongings across the country… and back again.

But now, we're home.

And I know that home is late-night laughter and lame TV.  Christmas lights on the deck rails and buckets of toy cars.  Making lasagna and salad and bread pudding and eating it with the people I love.

We have a house.  A beautiful house with views for miles.  A house I wouldn't have dreamed to ask for, and I'm incredibly grateful.  It's not the house that matters, of course, but permission to live inside.  Folding towels and putting away dishes feels like an incredible gift, lately.  My own coffee mugs in the cupboard, a bed big enough for us both, replacing the batteries in the smoke detectors and kissing my children goodnight in beds of their own.  It is a gift to choose your own shower curtain and eat off plates of your choosing...to wash laundry when it suits you and dry it in a dryer that doesn't shut itself off and to know in which drawer the can opener goes.  Perhaps I hadn't realized.  

And I am enjoying every minute of this extravagant gift -- toilets to clean and floors with crumbs and work to do to pay for bathroom trashcans and a few more bookshelves to make this place just. right.

Here, my heart has begun to find rest. 

Rest to unwrap the impact of the last few years.  Rest to learn again to love and trust the One who holds it all in His hands.  Rest to make a home for my family and the freedom to really live in it.  Rest to discover creativity again, to find beauty in joy and happiness, now, instead of merely striving for purpose in pain and worry.

And since coming home, I am remembering what it is to be a mother… a wife… a woman… a sister… a daughter.  I hadn't realized I'd forgotten, but I had.  And here, I am me again.

Welcome back, me.  Welcome crumbs and dirty towels.  Welcome grocery shopping and paying bills.  Welcome half-glasses of sweet red after dinner and frozen pizza now and then.  Welcome floors to sweep and windows to wash.  

Welcome, home.  

Wishing You a Peaceful Christmas

Home, Again

I'm alive.

(Surprising, I know.)

In the last couple of weeks, I've worked like a madwoman, looked at a dozen houses, pigged out on turkey, spent Black Friday in the emergency room, hobbled around on crutches, got diagnosed with gout, designed a tree for the Festival of Trees, dropped out of my chronic pain study, decided on a house, signed a lease, cleaned the new house, and, in 4 days, we'll be moving in to this home in the hills with a killer view.  It is decidedly free of shag carpet and other people's furniture.

Hallelujah.

Sunday morning, I will wake up to this (and this is the actual view from exactly where my bed will go):

Beautiful.  And I am so, so grateful.  The price is right.  The space is plenty.  The yard is abundant, the view extravagant.  And the Whimsy is happy.  Oh so very, very happy.

I'll probably be absent while moving, but before long, I'll share my home-making escapades with you all as we begin life again in our own place.  (Yay!)

Thanks for bearing with me, friends.  <3