Home

"Home" has been one of those words that has always been a real challenge for me.

I've tended to think of it in fairly narrow terms, as sort of a catch-all for one's ancestral place, where you were born and raised, the place where your "kin" were. In so many ways, I and my family never really had such a place; and the location where I was residing at this or that time was "home" only in some very loose sense.

Mom used this term very differently, I think. I suddenly realized this yesterday, while going through Mom's old photo albums. In her albums, "home" is wherever she and her family are living. Her family meaning her, Dad, me, and my sister. Later it meant her, me, and my sister. And towards the end, it meant her and me. In April, when in the hospital and rehab, and she said, "I want to go home," she meant the residence where she and I were living. A month ago, when dying, and when she said "I want to go home," she meant the same thing.

Hornersville, where she was born and raised, was in a special sense "home" to her as well. In her photo albums, though, she speaks of visits ... from Tulsa, from Libya ... to Hornersville, not visits "home". Yet when speaking to me orally she often referred to Hornersville as "home." The picture that she bought in the 1950s(?) that always was in a prominent place in her living room she bought, she told me, because it reminded her of "home" ... and said the "Joe Hole" (in Hornersville) looked like it could be right down the river from the scene in the picture.

"Home" has meant for me, for many many years, my True Home in Heaven. She acknowledged, I think, this use of the term; but never, or almost never, to my knowledge, used it this way. Her Home was in the Here and Now; or, in the case of Hornersville, in the There and Then.

And now how my own heart does ache ... for Home ... whatever Home might mean ... and especially the Home that is where she is ...