accept.

You can't go home again. Can you? 

Honestly, I never thought I could. The house where I grew up is no longer where my parents dwell. Many people who surrounded me as a young person are far from the area. Even the familiar sights and sounds are colored by a different perspective – perhaps that perspective comes from maturity, new priorities, and/or additional experiences gained. In any case, perspective can be advantageous. Or not so much.

When I return to my hometown to visit my folks, I'm struck by how different I feel. I'm no longer the teenager that requires a curfew. I'm no longer a bored tween who impatiently waits for my parents to finish up their dreadfully dull small talk with a neighbor. I'm sort-of a member of the adult community.

And yet, I'm sort-of not.

Home.

“Mama, I like pooping at home best” said one of my children after a satisfactory trip to the bathroom following a holiday visit with the relatives.

Maybe this is too much disclosure for my inaugural blog post, but I couldn’t agree more.

To me, the idea of "home" meets three specific needs: it is a place that offers space, acceptance, and comfort. In many ways, my current home offers me these three things to a greater degree than any home I've ever had in the past. It is the place that I crave when I am feeling upended, tired, or unready to have even one more conversation. Maybe it is because these needs are met so fully in my current space that I find that I do not crave the home of my childhood. Sure, I’d like to feel the velvet green wall paper, or hear the door slam on the Sherman Street house (it hit such a satisfying note when it was closed). And I would like to sit in the south windows of the Grainland Road house and let the Nebraska afternoon pool around me. But I don’t crave it. I feel at peace with the fact that that is a world now gone and I find comfort in the one that surrounds me. For me, going home simply means opening my kitchen door and crossing the threshold. And although it doesn’t offer the element of “return” and the perspective of time that visiting my childhood hometown allows, it is the place in this world that I crave more than any other.

wistful - you really can't go home again

That old truism, "You can never go home again" is never more expressed than at the winter holidays.  The "home" referred to is such an elusive beast, both physical and rhetorical, with a dash of nostalgia for good measure.  In my rural childhood, my grandmother was most thrilled (in a busy, overburdened sort of way) when her whole family was "HOME for Christmas".  She meant, of course, that 16 people would travel between 10 minutes and 10 hours from their own street addresses, stay under her roof, play Canasta, attend a candlelight service in their childhood church, and open late-night presents in her living room.

First Trinity - where at least 3 generations are buried.

Bring the younger 9 of those people into adulthood and sprinkle them across the continent with their own responsibilities, families, and schedules, and things begin to shift.  Subtract the grandmother, then the grandfather, then even the big old farmhouse, and what becomes of grandma's home?