Return Home

It has been a long long time since I have posted here, and there are many reasons for that. After two years away, I have moved back to Texas, but that is not all that has happened in the past year. I will post about the other changes on a different day. There has been a lot of sadness but today I am feeling good about life and it's infinite possibilities, so today I just want to dwell on pleasant things.

We made the decision to come back to Texas at the beginning of last summer, and started looking, trying to determine where we should settle. We eliminated places that were unfamiliar to us, because the truth is, we were eager to get back to the familiar -- doctors we know, dentists we never quit, friends and family we missed. Grocery stores. Movie theaters. Libraries. All the things we gave up to embark on the high-altitude, mountain life of the past two years. Fact is, we just missed home.

I had a good friend say to me: "You can take the girl out of Texas, but you can't take Texas out of the girl." That kind of irked me when she said it, because it's too simplistic. Home is more than a place, it's a feeling of belonging, of familiar comforts, of being right with the world. Home is where you go to understand who you are.

One definition I found for the word home says "the place in which one's domestic affections are centered." I like that definition best. I never felt those domestic affections for the place in the mountains. I enjoyed many aspects of life there, the neighbors, the wildlife, the clean air, and the uniqueness of the place. But the winters are far too long for me. I didn't mind the cold, but the length of the season was just too much for a person with a slightly green thumb and a desire to plant things for beauty and consumption. The conveniences of a bigger city were too distant to take advantage of often enough, and the economic opportunities were too few as well.

So we are back. And we have bought an old "homey" place that I think will indeed become the object of our "domestic affections." Nothing is perfect, and the weather here -- especially in the summer -- will no doubt become a burden. But I like knowing where I am going, where to find things I need, the names of the plants, trees, and flowers, as well as how to go about growing them. I like being close enough to my grandson to see him more than three times a year, and I like having my extended family nearby, too. I like the food here, places to eat and what's best on the menus. I like not needing a map to get from point A to point B. I like feeling like I am home.