…where a brave and beautiful bunch gather every week to find out what comes out when we all spend five minutes writing on the same topic and then sharing ‘em over here.

Go:
Sometimes I confuse house and home and I have to stop and mentally remind myself one is not the other. And in the end one matters so much more.

I find myself coveting a different….house. We chose ours a decade ago when its quirkiness felt just right to remind us who we had been- that becoming home-owners didn’t mean we were growing away from ourselves.

Its’ wood-framed windows that swell in the heat and refuse to open. The glass doorknobs that come just a bit looser with each and every turn. The peeling paint and plaster that spiders its way across the rooms. The wild and tangled yard that blocks us from the too-busy street connecting us to town. The upstairs that we assumed we would one day remodel. It all fell together in a charming gabled angle long before we had three little birds feathering our nest.

With these little ones under foot I find myself mentally rearranging and remodeling. Shoving and scraping at the windows to make sure they will open. A screwdriver stored in the green pantry hutch to tighten those pesky doorknobs over and over. A new coat of paint to cover the “old cracks” that the six-year-old cheerily points out in case we hadn’t noticed them. Adding a fence to separate little strong-willed heads from the bustling cars and roaming dogs. Dreaming of lifting the whole kit and caboodle “Up” style to a road that lets us walk and wagon and tricycle our way to a park. I feel overwhelmed some nights with the restlessness of our things as they push and stack against each other cluttering each room as we grow and grow and I click all the more feverishly through the websites that showcase better and bigger and just plain different thinking, maybe this one…

And then just when I’m at my most claustrophobic, the afternoon sun shines through the white wooden window panes and catches the red highlight of a little ponytail bouncing behind the dolly stroller around the corner. The noise of the doorknob thudding to the carpet is quickly followed by the rascaling giggles of sisters hiding and seeking. The warm yellow paint of the dining room glows around my face as I peer in to the churning bread dough that will rise steamily to become our daily bread. Their bubble and popsicle-coated feet splash in and out of the yellow plastic pool as the nearby bbq smokes the potatoes and chicken under the warm summer sun. The pile of coloring and story books topple off the tiny corner table revealing the latest sentence the six year old has written in her tentative crayoned scrawl: “I love you. Do you love me?”
And I think…home as I shut down my computer screen.

Stop