The chance of a life time

 Once, long long ago, when I was twelve years old, we moved to a house in the country.  There were trees to climb, apples to make apple sauce from growing in the yard, a horse tethered in the back, even old outbuildings to turn into forts and club houses.  It should have been an idyllic summer.

Later we moved back into town, into the house we had lived in all through my elementary school years.  I got to paint my bedroom the color I wanted, I had a glow in the dark clock with a space capsule for a second hand, and I began dating a boy who drove a TR3.  Life should have been almost perfect.

Finally, just before my senior year we moved to that charming little town you read about in books and see in movies.  Our house had a big wrap around porch, Grandma's house was a short walk away.  We had a monkey and a parrot for pets as well as a large German Shepard dog.  People sang opera and Italian love songs in the local grocery store.  And I was offered the chance to travel, to see parts of the country I had never seen before.  The chance of a life time.

I wanted to go and I didn't want to go, but my mother talked me into it.  My brother and I would go with our uncle while my other brother and sister went with my dad to see our Grandmother in Texas.  Everyone would get a vacation while my mother stayed home and took care of business.  It should have been perfect.

Instead it was hard!  I found myself in unfamiliar situations that should have been adventures.  The mountains of West Virginia and the culture of a coal mining town were fascinating, but I was homesick.  Not just for my family, I was really with family, but for the peace and stability of a life where everything wasn't changing, where the only stability was my mom and dad.  I knew, when I returned I would be going to a new school, living in a new house, making new friends, getting ready to go off to college.  I was saturated with changes and that trip was just one thing too many.

I was miserable and I made everyone else miserable.  In the end my brother and I went home on a rattle trap old bus filled with people eating lunch out of plastic bags and carrying baskets of things with them to other small mountain towns.  We ended up waiting hours in a dirty little bus stop in Ohio until our parents showed up to take us home and the trip home was hot and cramped and long.

But I remember how happy I was to be in that car, my brother sleeping on one side of the back seat while I chattered incessantly to my parents over the back of the front seat.  I was home!

Home was wherever my parents were, wherever we were all together and no matter where that was I needed the safety and security of that, especially with so many life changes coming up ahead of me.