Home for the Holidays

As I reflect on the whirlwind of 2008 I have come to the conclusion that it was a year of creating “home.” While a certain part of the concept of home will always be my parents and the places and faces of my childhood, there is a process that one undertakes as an adult of piecing together the comforting and necessary parts of a life. And if this process is done carefully and mindfully, the results become part of you. Although they cannot replace the home of your inner child, they expand the concept.
At some point, something will happen to shake you. Maybe it’s something big, maybe something small, maybe an onslaught of things. In need of comfort you will go home to recover and you will realize that “home” is not what it used to be.
Many times as I have worked to become an autonomous person and assert my independence, I have needed the restorative powers of home and have gone back to Tacoma to recover and rebuild. And each time I made my way back out into the world, I would pack it up and keep a tiny version of it with me. Frozen in an idyllic caricature of itself, it would become worn and faded from travel and handling. And then I always would return again to repair it.
Without really realizing what I was doing, at some point I quit repairing. I started improving. I started building. And then I packed. And then I moved. And when I did I was very sure that I would enjoy my time here in Portland. I was very sure that it would be interesting and enjoyable. But I was also very sure that it would never be “home.”
But really with no fanfare and with shocking speed, part of home, the biggest part of home, is now here.
Visiting Washington these past few weekends during the holidays, I became aware that some people and some places and some memories that are home to me will always be there but the restorative and reassuring qualities of home now reside in the quiet corners of my atrociously pink colored little house in Portland.
Because no matter how enthralling the rest of the world is, its only there, with my husband chuckling over a book and my dog dreaming on the living room rug, that I can sort out the happenings of my life and leisurely put them where they belong.
On the first day of 2008 I lived in a sunshine yellow, rented bungalow in Tacoma Washington. I was surrounded by family and friends. My husband and I had no intention of leaving our good paying jobs. We had love and purpose and support and comfort all around us.
It is strange the way things can unfold, so rapidly and so painfully slowly at the same time. But though the year, all the things that came to pass; every disappointment and every challenge met, culminated in the moment I got “home” this last Saturday night. The happy mess of a New Years Eve dinner party was there to greet us. We were too tired to unpack our car. We simply turned the heat back on and collapsed into bed. “It’s good to be home!” I sighed and my husband agreed.
It was as I settled into sleep, under the soft glow of his reading light, listening to Taj turn the three circles he must turn on his doggie bed before laying down for the night, that I realized how much I meant it. Of all the places in the world, this is the most home.