Home

I love our home.  It is perfect for us.  I love the way it looks welcoming in the fall when the mums are blooming

I love seeing what the window box is going to look like each year.  It's never the same look.

I love seeing the flowers bloom in the spring

I just plain love it.

Our home is a ranch.  Our laundry is on the main floor.  My office has a beautiful arched window.   The kitchen is the perfect size and one of my favorite spots to be, and the living room is starting to take shape for what works best for us. 

We hope to retire in this home.  That is unless we win the lottery and buy a house in Duluth on Lake Superior.

But we're not counting on that :)

There are houses similar to ours, some smaller, some larger.  We even have a house nearby which is identical in design to ours. So in that respect our home is like many other homes.  Everyone tries to set their house apart from others as we all want to put our individual stamp on our home.  This is where we spend our time with family and friends and we all want our homes to reflect our personalities. 

When we had to sell my parents' house it was such a hard  thing to do.  That was my childhood home and a place I had lived for 18 years, then a home I had gone back to for 30 years to visit.  The thought of someone else living there was hard to accept.  To me that was always "home," regardless of where  I lived.   And I wasn't quite ready to let someone else call it that. 

When in my hometown I didn't go by the house for the longest time.  I think it was a year before I could go by the house once it had been sold.  The hedge was gone, otherwise the house looked pretty much the same.  Part of me was thrilled that it still looked like "home."  And part of me wished there had been more changes on the outside so it would not look so much like "home." 

Does that make sense?  

But seeing the house was easier than I thought it would be as something had changed, not with the house, but with me. 

In that period of time I realized that my Mom and Dad's house was just that,  a house.  I realized what made their house a home was them waiting at the door each time I pulled in the driveway.  It was them giving hugs and kisses goodbye each time I left and always, ALWAYS saying, "drive carefully" and "we love you."  It was home where we had family Christmases and each year as our family grew the tree became less visible due to the number of presents we exhanged; not because we were materialistic, but because our family had grown from 7 to 41.  It was home because I had grown up playing Red Rover and Tag with the neighborhood kids there.  We played in the sandbox.  We waded in the water in front of Mrs. Leland's house when it rained enough that the water couldn't go down the drain fast enough.  (I don't think she was very thrilled when we did that, but she tolerated it.)  

So many life experiences happened in that house, both big and small, but more importantly it was the people that were there.   It was hard to separate the house as a structure from those who made it home. 


But in that year I was able to do it. 

I dream about that house a lot.  I hope the person who bought it has a family some day and I hope those children enjoy having it be their "home" and have as many fun and special memories of it as I do.  It was a great house to grow up in. 


But we move on and we create our own homes.

While I love many things about our home, what I love most is the people who share it with me:  my husband, Belle (yep, I count her as people), our kids, grandkids, and family when they are here, as well as friends who stop over. 

It's not the structural or material things that make a house a home.

It's the people.

I love our people :)