On home

 

Robert Frost said that home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.  I love this sentiment and think of it often as I drive the country roads that lead me slowly but surely to the place where I grew up, and where I often long to return.  

I routinely discover that I am navigating my adult life with the principles and aspirations that developed within me as a child, when I was merely a little girl sitting up in an old farmhouse typing away on a hand-me-down typewriter.  My love of writing, my commitment to family, the enjoyment I find from exploring, discovering and learning, all the things I value and hold dear began at home.  

Home.  This word we use so casually but whose meaning, significance, all the sentiments the word encompasses are often too numerous to grasp.

For those of us who are very lucky, home is the place we can return to and find ourselves again.  Because doesn't it often feel that no matter how much time has gone by or how different our lives might be, home is exactly the way we remember it?  It is exactly the way we need it to be. 

Of course, home can be many different things and many different places, depending on who you are.  Everyone has their own idea of home and while the descriptions of houses and towns may often differ in extreme ways, the feelings about home and the comforts it evokes bring us all to a common ground. 

Home is our beginning, our history, in some cases the roots of the family we stem from.

If nothing else, home is a timeless destination.  One that in younger years we were so anxious to leave, but later on in life are desperate to once again return.  And whether we are returning to rediscover a place, or rediscover ourselves, the promise of fulfillment upon reaching our destination keeps us moving.  Keeps us forever moving.  Toward home.