In This House

Day 324

This is the house I always thought of as home even though we lived in other places. It was that way until my grandmother died. I try not to let my mind drift to how horribly betrayed my father was to discover he could not inherit the house as was his mother’s intent. It is a story which I will write someday, but not today. That will be a post about honesty, trust and betrayal. But today is not that day.

Maybe home is that place where we feel safe. Where none of the world’s problems can get to us. Maybe it is where our memories reside and where we learn who we are to be one day. I know this house was all of that to me. When we recall the love of home, it is not the house we remember so much, but the memories forged between those walls.

My grandparents slept in different rooms. My grandfather upstairs and my grandmother downstairs. When my grandfather slept, we tried to sneak in his room without waking him. The goal was to taste the cinnamon and sugar mixture he kept on his bedside table to help his cough. His bed rail was perfect for creating horses, using a towel and pillow for saddle blanket and saddle and a belt for a bridle. (Must have been sturdy furniture back then).

We had a room with bunkbeds. The top bunk was where we used an old stick with twine and an open safety pin as a fishing rod to catch the wire-hanger fish we had scattered on the floor.

This was the house my father grew up in. The place where he swears he saw little green men from outer space when he was home alone one day.

This porch is where we hung our heads over the edge of the knee wall to wash our hair in the rainwater.

Out back we had a small arbor of Concord grapes that was buzzing with bees in the summer months. My grandmother made the best jelly from those grapes and my grandfather made a small quantity of wine he kept in the cellar.

There was a Rose of Sharon bush that stood at the corner of the house. This is where I first observed the ability of a hummingbird to fly backwards. As I write this I can see the hummingbirds darting in and out of the hosta blooms outside my kitchen window.

Home was where I knew I was loved and felt safe. There would be many more places of residence in my life, but the number of ‘homes’ are relatively small in number.