Home

Our house is starting to look like a home.

Although it was purchased less than a year ago and was brand new, therefore no one's home, there is now grass where there was none. A sproutling hedge along the side to keep the neighbor's big dog and its poo in their own yard. There are hanging baskets of ferns and also three ficus trees lounging on the porch. One, two, three small maple trees grace our front yard with their promise of shade in future, taller years. And pink petunias in the flower bed beside the requisite marigold seedlings that need to exist for me to call a place my home.

I love marigolds with their sunny warm color faces. Orange. Yellow. Variegated. I even like their particular, peculiar odor. When I look at my home now, I see a yard I had imagined when I was a child. Just this past weekend, my father said how he didn't really care if my mother's gardenias keeled over and died. "I don't like all that mess." He likes a yard to mow; he likes to use the weedeater to make the straight narrow lines and sharp corners and that is the end of it. This was my childhood. Wanting to make things grow that were not grass, and not being able to use the soil in my father's domain. But now I have my own soil. And a husband who doesn't mind mowing around things, bless him.


Brother loved to play in the dirt and mud and clay that made up our yard for so long. He still wallows in the dusty spots where I can't see. I would despair of how filthy he would get, covered all over with dust. Even now there are green places to play and he still loves the dirt. And I still despair of his dirtiness. I guess there comes a point in every mother-of-a-son's life when she accepts that this sweet child who she lovingly bathed and combed is going to go roll in the dirt pile until he bears an adequate resemblance to Pigpen of the Peanuts.


Yes, this house is becoming our home. It is a journey of sorts that we have just begun. But I had a thought the other night, staring at my bedroom ceiling in the dusky darkness that one day, we would drive by this place and someone else would be living here. Cooking their meals and perhaps even laying in the very spot I was laying in, waiting for sleep to come. The thought made me sad at the time. That this place would not be Our House forever. But now, while the thought still evokes melancholy, it also is hopeful. Hopeful that the place where our memories currently reside, in the kitchen, the bedrooms, will live on to be filled with more memories, other people's dreams and laughter. I guess what I mean to say is that the homes where life takes place really do go on just as the lives lived in them go on. And that makes me glad.