Home.

I was reading Mushy's recent post about his bittersweet homecoming from Vietnam, and it got me thinking about the nature of "home". He says in that post that upon returning home, he never wanted to leave it again, and for the most part he never has. I started to ask myself where my home is? I have a house and land now, and my folks have a house in Temple, but none of these places really feel like home to me.

I've lived in a lot of places in my life, being a service brat. You've all heard the story before. I lived in some of them longer than others, but none of those places were really home. I have very fond memories of many places, like the hills and woods of Missouri, where I learned to love the outdoors. I still have fond feelings for Ft. Worth, where we lived the longest, and where I put down the deepest roots. But we lived in three different houses in Ft. Worth in 18 years, and when I go back there the place has changed so much it's impossible to still see it as home. I love the city, and my friends that still live up there, but the thought of moving back there seems wrong, like going backwards in stead of forwards in my life.

I think I must have developed a pretty thick skin through the process of moving around all those times. We'd live somewhere just long enough to begin to get comfortable and have friends, and then the imperatives of my fathers career would intervene and we'd find ourselves starting again somewhere else. I'd be the new kid in school again, with a whole new series of idiots who wanted to test me. I guess I learned from all that moving around to take places for granted and build a new nest wherever I landed.

I turned into a pack rat, collecting all sorts of things that represented where I'd been and who I was. The legacy of that today is that I never throw anything away, because everything represents something personal to me. People come to my house now and are amazed at all the stuff I've accumulated. I joke that the next time I have to move I'm just gonna set fire to the place and start all over again clean, but you know I wouldn't. This stuff is all too important to me.

Throughout all those early years, while my sister and I grew up moving from place to place, our parents filled our heads with stories of their small town home and early life in rural Texas. Those stories planted a longing in us for the life they had lived, but that we could never have. Now and then we'd get to come back here to Bell county and spend time at our maternal grandparents house outside Temple. Dad's folks died while I was little, so I never got to see much of them or spend time there. My Mom's folks were the only grandparents I knew. One summer in the early '70s we even got to hang out there at the farm for about two-and-a-half weeks.

It was a totally different world than the one we lived in, and the closest thing to seeing "home" in a place I think I ever had in my early life. "Deed'n and Papa" represented stability and continuity. They would always be there in the same place, no matter where we were moved to. Their old farm was the anchor that we drifted around as the tides of my fathers career shifted our little family from one destination to another.



Here's a shot of my mom (center of the front row) and her family and friends in the early 1940s, sitting in front of that farm house, with the cotton fields behind it.

I realize now what my parents were giving up when they decided to leave this home and make a life in the Air Force. I understand what they sacrificed to give themselves and their children a chance at greater possibilities. They left the comfort of extended families and support networks; friends, family and places they'd known all their lives, and set off into the world. I think it took great courage to do that, and they must have missed their home a lot as they told us old stories at the dinner table. This was an important revelation to me when it dawned on me years ago. I'd always thought primarily of my own pain and what I imagined I'd missed out on, but after moving here as an adult I began to see some things in a more sympathetic way. I know now that they must have been in great pain, and I love them that much more now for going through it and giving me the life and opportunities I've had.

I moved here in the mid-1990s, and I got the chance to try to connect with the home and family my folks enjoyed as children, only the place had changed. My grandparents were dead by then, my cousin's ether uninterested or moved away. The old house that symbolized home and stability to my sister and I so many years ago was falling down and in ruins. By the turn of the last century it was unoccupied and dilapidated. My folks had sold it after my grandmother moved to a nursing home in the early '90s, and the new owner was renting it out to Mexican migrant workers.

The land around it was plowed farm land, but the house and the surrounding little town had become increasingly shabby and run down. I used to drive by the place on the way to teaching gigs for Temple College, and eventually began to hope that a tornado would come along and wipe the slate clean so the place could exist only in my memory. Eventually the owner complied with that unspoken wish and tore it down, to make way for a new warehouse.

I don't go by there any more. Why torture myself? My folks are older and their memories are failing, so the old stories are told less seldom, and less clearly. All the things that I imagined existed in this wonderland that was my mental image of parents childhood home have been redeveloped or abandoned, and it increasingly exists only in my memories. When my folks go, as they inevitably will, there really won't be anything left to tie me here. The places I live in now only serve to hold the things that really represent family and home to me, and I can take them anywhere I want. The world will be open to me. I can easily imagine piling all the essential stuff of my life in one of those fancy mobile homes and becoming a gypsy. See the world... again.

In the end, I suppose "home" is really where the heart is. While they live, my heart will always be where my folks are. Until recently, being alone in my own life, I always had a horror of seeing them go and being left alone in the world. Now, having found someone I think I may be able share my life with, I think I'll be OK. So long as we continue to be able to put up with one another, my stuff and my heart will always reside where my sweetheart is. I can rebuild my nest anywhere she wants to go. That's what my whole life has taught me to do, so I guess everything will be OK.

I hope everything will always be OK where you are, and that your heart will always have a warm home to nest in. Cheers.