A House, A Home

Yesterday I had good cause to notice the difference between a house and a home.

Five months to the day after we had our last meal, just the two of us at our little table, before leaving for Tucson, just before leaving our little 'second home' behind, we sat together again at home in Anacortes.

In reality, I think there is no such thing as a second home. Home is where the heart is, and also the essentials of life: the favorite frying pan, the family-history archives and heirlooms, the folders full of income-tax returns. (This observation presumes that all these things are in one place.)

Saturday night we arrived back in Anacortes, having driven for 16 hours minus a 50 minute lunch break, and having stopped at the store on the way in to pick up some essentials to get us through till Monday.

As we sat at that same little table, eating a bite of supper at 11 pm, the circle closed. We were right where we'd been. The 5 highly stressful months in Tucson were effectively excluded. We were home now, and all that was 'other'. I was neither all happy nor all sad: it just WAS. It was the first moment when I fully realized that home was here now.

Why not all happy? We love Tucson. We just can't have it. It's hard to live in two places. Going back and forth, the original model of having two houses, means never being 'home'. It's stressful and unsettling. One has to pick.

Further, in these years of missions and travel, having domiciles sprinkled here and there is unnecessary and not even appealing. One is enough.

And one is good. I have said for several months that we want to be homeless when we go on our mission. That sounds a bit cute. Other senior-missionary couples have said it. But the fact is, we don't want to be homeless. We want a homebase to return to. We want friends who miss us. We want a recognizable HOME for family members to visit and grow fond of, because it's ours and has a great deal of us in it and around it.

And for now, this little house in Anacortes is home. As we go about putting things away from the 5 months out of town, the very decisions are different now that this is home. The awkwardnesses or compromises of what goes where are not as tolerated, for example. Things need to be 'right' about it, because it's home.

Not that this is the ultimate house. It is still going on the market. Anacortes is home, and this is our current house. But as soon as we can we'll be finding and moving to the final house, which will become our true home.

We haven't had a true home since Sweetwater. We left there in 1997. The time has come...