From Under My Cowboy Hat: HOME

Saturday, April 2, 2016

HOME

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Robert Frost wrote that line in his Death of the Hired Man piece, one of my personal favorites. I thought of that sentence as I walked back to the house from the garden this week. I love the picture I see of the cherry, apple, and ornamental trees and the flower gardens on the walk up to the porch.. I love coming up to the back porch through the winding, flower lined sidewalk and then sitting in my rocker, after I retrieve a glass of sweet tea from the old enameled table. As I look out across the Chicken Ranch I think “ Home.”

Home is where you hang your hat every night at the back door. Where boots and mud shoes are lined up ready for use, and where chore jackets, sweaters, and gloves hang on winter days. It’s the place where your key fits the door if you have to lock it, and your closest relatives and friends know where to find the spare if they need in. It’s the place where your most precious material possessions are grouped together under one roof. But home is much more than something you can reach out and touch.

Home is your sanctuary. It’s the place where your most private thoughts are expressed, uninhibited. You’re free to sob in sorrow unashamed, or laugh hysterically without embarrassment. Home is the safe place for your most intimate thoughts and actions. You sleep, eat, and convalesce here. Home is where you feel completely at ease just being you.

In sincerity and kindness folks often say “Our home is your home”, “Make yourself at home” or “You are at home here”. While well meaning I’m sure, the reality of what is being said most often is, ‘Be at home here… to a point’. Your own home is uniquely and wholly yours. What we love, what we hate, what we desire, what we fear, are all expressed in what we surround ourselves with, in the most personal of settings…home. And home is people.

Home is where your family is. Family, by definition, is typically two parents and their offspring, and for us that is the case. We have our children and grandchildren here very often, and Patty and I feel blessed to have a place for all of us to call home. But, all of us also have friends, dear friends, that make up part of our family. Friends, who share in our joys and sorrows, our elevations and devastations. Friends, who know where the spare key is hid and are welcomed anytime, with gladness. Folks that are not part of our DNA but who are connected to us in a spiritual, personal way.

Home is all of these things.

I think it would be a terrible thing to be truly ‘homeless’. How sad if there is no place, when you have no place left to go, that folks will take you in. Home can be where you reside or where you grew up. Home is, after all, wherever you feel it is.
The Chicken Ranch. Home sweet Home.

I’m grateful for this patch of dirt, house and sky that is unique to Patty and me. This place where all that we are, and all that we love… is. There isn’t anywhere else like it. Dorothy said it best in the Wizard of Oz. Clicking her heels together, longing for the place where she felt the most loved, and the most secure, she repeated over and over “ There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home…” And there isn’t, really, any place like home.