The Journey Home

Home is such a subjective word.   For me it means that place where I am most comfortable being myself and my apartment is definitely my first home.   Here I have my bed, my few treasured possessions and the place that I come back to again and again.

Yet I have a second home, a place I go to be with people on holidays, a place where I seem to always be welcome and have been for a long time.  And I have other homes along the way where I have hung my hat whether it was my straw sunbonnet, little white ball cap, or winter wooly. 

Today, as I traveled along I55 I had a need to go home, a need to stop and see my brother, to visit the graves of my grandmother and great grandmother, to pause in front of my parents’ grave and give them a heads up.  And so I made a grand detour moving from home to home across the heartland on this sunny July day in the year 2011.

It turned out to be brief.  Ten minutes here, five minutes there, in between two of my children called me on the phone from their homes and I even stopped at my sister’s home along the way.

Now I am in my apartment, but I realize that home truly is where the heart is and that it can depend on the moment.  On occasions, that can even be a place I’ve never set foot in, but where my heart is irrevocably touched by those I’ve met along this Way.