home.

[gallery link="file" columns="5"] Warm door knob waiting on cold nights.  Waiting.  Wanting.  Welcome.

Walls whisper greetings and memories both enchanting and unnerving.  Home is where the heart is and where treasure buried deep feeds the soil of one's heart, always and forever.  Some run fleeing the scene of life colliding in plain sight of a remembering rear view mirror.  The past on fire burning pain, the smoke rising shamefully.  The smell of soot and ash unwashable and unbearable.  So they run hard and fast for day different than past.  The rush away only thins blood and makes wide the wounds.  They run with covered faces, smiling.  Memories remain, smoldering heap of moments wished to be forgotten, strained to be lost.  Deep it feeds the soil.  The door knob always waiting to be opened.

Here's what the wise know:  Everyone breaks.  Some learn to break well.  The pieces collected buried purposefully and they feed the soil lush with newer life.

Home for me is quiet.  I always know who I am there.  The ground always warm with blood and tears and smiles and fears conquered.  I laid love there in the earth.  Fed the soil, waited for new birth.  A brother once alive taught me to live, swinging the bat through the cool, crisp fall air at countless pitches thrown by the man who made me better but has disappeared, supper ready always on time by the woman who first showed me to love through, a sister lifting my shadow to the size of a hero.  Home.  All of these and more.  Soil in my heart and bones.  Carried to day now.  Present.  Dwarfing tomorrow to a resolving happiness.

This land knows me well.  In ways I will always allow, it owns me.  When we embrace my feet on its ground, I remember well who I am and who I can be.

Pine needles and leaves.  Bruised ground where a wood stack once rotted down.  A chimney leak unsolvable.  Bricks the color of Mexico.  Life staked to an unwavering trust in faith, hope and love.

This is where I live.  The home that made me.

Truly it is good to be home.