Home Again

Country roads in the fall.

I was a dark-haired kid, full of fun and moods. I wanted to be inside reading most of the time, but I’d never turn down a walk up the road to my grandparents’ house, especially on a warm summer evening when Grandpa would already be in from the fields and you could count on the two of them sitting in lawn chairs under a shady tree in the front yard. My sister, close enough in age and appearance that we were often mistaken for twins, and I would chase lightning bugs and, if we were lucky, get invited in for a game of Uno or Skip-Bo or Rook, napkins piled high with marshmallows beside our stacks of cards and cold cans of caffeine free Diet Mountain Dew to sip after we’d played our turns.

I thought I was so lucky to live where I did and secretly pitied my friends who didn’t grow up on a farm, who didn’t have a valley of woods behind their houses, who couldn’t go out and scream into the woods for the joy of hearing your own voice and the answering echo. I felt sorry for people whose parents weren’t teachers, as my parents had classrooms for me to do my homework after school or curl up and read my current book, and they had all summer off with us. I loved the hammock strung between two trees in the front yard, and the fair chance that it might break with you in it–I’d seen it happen to my dad and to his friend on two separate occasions. I loved the wind in my hair when I rode in the back of the truck to check my grandpa’s cattle. I loved how my grandma would stop whatever she was doing when we appeared at her door out of the blue, and how, when I crawled under her dining table to dust the chair legs, I could hear her singing hymns while she puttered around in the kitchen.

I loved our little white country church, with the painting of Jesus behind the pulpit and the brown door that led back to the MYF room, where Helen answered all our questions about Jesus and helped us see, through her words, actions, and stories, who he was. I loved vacation Bible school and all my teachers. I loved the day when I walked alone to the altar to pray and accept Jesus as my Savior. I can’t remember exactly what I said in that prayer, but I can still hear the collective thump from behind me as I knelt at the altar–my parents and practically every other adult in the church on their way right behind me, and when I stopped praying and stood up, there they all were, all around me, crying and hugging me, and I didn’t have words for it then, but I knew I was home. 

I think about home a lot lately, about the safety and security I felt nestled on that farm, surrounded by family and by people who might as well be family. I stretch out on the old brown couch, my head on a Christmas pillow we still haven’t put away, and I consider the current school closure for COVID and the isolation I felt at my testing training today, everyone properly masked and spaced at a distance.

I have zero problems with masks or social distance or anything else that keeps people safe, but so many things are different now. That little church was ripped by a tornado; both of my grandfathers are gone; I don’t live within walking distance of anyone whom I’d feel comfortable swinging by without calling. My kids grew up in a subdivision. And yet. 

The world is uncertain, but I’m not. I will love this place and these people, even the ones who are hard to love, however I can. The world does its thing, but I am so thankful to be here, in this spot, at this time, with these people. We will figure out the rest.