There Is No Place Like Home

“There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.” (Dorothy ~ Wizard of Oz)

I do not have to click my ruby slippers to remember or find my way back...I never left.

Of all things considered when Jim died, leaving this place…this house…our home…was never in my heart. When queried by friends, relations and even mere acquaintances within days and throughout the following years my answer has always been that here was where I would remain.

These aging uprights are steeped in the love, generosity and spirit of a special man who gave grace and meaning to my existence. Memories echo from every crevice within its welcoming confines. Flashbacks of life lived each day in the simple pleasure of being together, music, children’s laughter, soothing their tears and easing their fears.

Other than feeling lost and insecure in the world in general since Jim’s death, I have never felt unsafe in this house. It has been a healing cocoon…a soothing balm…to my aching heart steadying my steps and missteps along this widows’ path. I have missed his physical presence to the darkest recesses of my shredded soul and spilt tears to fill an ocean in my grief. I have paced its sagging floors, fingered its warped, oft painted walls and floundered in my sorrow. Even as I struggled to flee this unwelcome life I never thought to live elsewhere.

Overflowing with 30 years of life - growing up as a young bride, raising our 2 children, healing us from the loss of an unborn child, harboring a bereft grand daughter when her daddy heartlessly removed himself from her life at age 3 and cloistering her equally staggered mother – this space has sheltered me through both the happiest and bleakest days of my life. For a time over 3 years I have wrapped myself deep within the solace of this tiny 1970’s cookie cutter, brick veneer, cracker box plunked in the middle of an old cow pasture in the boonies of this backward piece of southernicity I call home.

Every joist, every beam, every living cell of this home has felt his loving spirit. No matter the dark nights that haunted my soul, his lingering presence has been at the heart of my healing giving me hope to step back into the sunlight, truly live and even love once again.

While my Handyman and I are reinventing and making our own stamp on this place as we rejuvenate its spirit with the essence of our own growing relationship, it will ever have Jim’s legacy as its foundation.

Our love for each other and our departed spouses add flavor to what is already here. Someday, he and I may move to another place passing on the gift of its tender heart. But, for this time…this chapter of our life…here is where we will remain secure that we enhance what was begun another lifetime ago.

This is home.