Home is . . .
What is home? It’s where you get your coffee, right? Maybe.
Is home a place you go? Or is home a group of people you surround yourself with? Could it be both? Could home mean more than one thing or place? Home to me isn’t just where I lay down to sleep at night. Especially since I’ve spent a night or two sleeping in an airport, my car, a friend’s couch, etc. When I say I’m going home – it usually means one of two things. One of those things refers to a specific town.
If you find yourself in Southern Colorado, I encourage you to visit a tiny little town called Mosca. It sits just West of the Great Sand Dunes National Park on Highway 17. There is a little country store there – The Mosca Pit Stop – where I spent the first five years of my life running laps around the shelves. I used to practice my handwriting in the back office, and I nearly cut off my finger with a pair of scissors just outside the office door. There is an old stove there that I would us to warm up my hands after playing outside. Before the coffee station was upgraded, there was an old single pot coffee pot that I would use to make coffee to refill either my grandfather or father’s mug. I used to follow my mom around the stock room as she taught me how to rotate product (putting the oldest product in the front of the shelf, and the newer product behind the older product prevents product going out of date). Behind the employee only door I worked bagging potatoes to earn my very first paycheck. Sitting at my grandmother and grandfather’s desks I discovered writing. I tried to help, I (occasionally) got in the way, and I learned about business management
These days, the Mosca Pit Stop looks different. In the past year alone, it has doubled in size. Yet somehow it still invites you to sit at the table and read the comics over a cup of coffee. Seriously, go visit either on your way to or from the Sand Dunes.
Down the street and around the corner is a house with dogs in the yard and my handprint in the patio where I still call home even though I haven’t lived there in six years. It’s the house I grew up in. It’s the house I came home to after the worst and best days of my adolescence. It was a house filled with love, laughter and joy. My parents poured their hearts into my sisters and I while we lived in this house, and they poured their hearts into the house. When we moved in the house was a green. It wasn’t a dark forest green or even a neutral green, it was a relatively bright green that had been dulled by time. There was a huge back yard, but there was no fence. Upstairs had a gloriously red shaggy carpet and the linoleum in the kitchen had a hole by the living room door where you could see a teaser of the hard wood that hid beneath it. As home improvement projects were under taken it was discovered that the furnace vented into the attic instead of the chimney, the interior closet walls would grow ice in the winter because water was soaking through from the outside, and the gas line to the furnace was installed six inches above the floor and had been “mudded in” to the adobe wall.
Adobe is a common type of mud that was used as a building material in the southwest, it acts a bit like cement when it dries.
Now days, the house is nearly unrecognizable from that original state. It took 22 years to get it to where it is now, but it looks great. The green plaster has been covered with red bricks, the carpet and linoleum has been pulled out to reveal the hard wood, a fence has been added (and destroyed by falling tree branches) and the coffee pot has been replaced (a lot).
I was taught a lot about life in that little house. I learned who Jesus was, I learned that “change is our friend” (I fought that so hard as a child), I learned how to control my temper, I learned that I’m not always right, and I learned how to love. When my sisters and I fought, we got the pleasure of sitting on the couch while holding hands until we could hug it out and make up. This house on the corner is the one that “built me”.
A mile out of town there is a house with a large tree out front. This tree has a rope hanging down that my cousins and sisters and I used to climb every Sunday following church. It was at the top of this tree that I overcame my fear of heights. One day, I had climbed up on my own (success!) but then I looked down. I couldn’t climb down. I cried real tears and my father and uncle had to come save me. However, I was then told that I either had to be able to climb down on my own or I wasn’t allowed to climb up. I never asked for help climbing down again. For years, until we started leaving for college, we spent nearly every Sunday at grandma and grandpa’s house. There was a trampoline there until 10 of us kids all jumped up and down at the same time (luckily the ground was sandy when we hit it). Even now, living across the country, I am still trying to perfect the biscuits that grandpa made on Sundays.
This little town wasn’t perfect, it still isn’t. Yet it is still home. Here’s the thing about home – it doesn’t always have to give you a warm and fuzzy feeling. Usually when I think about this place I do think about the warm happy memories, but there were bad days too. I remember a time (the latter half of high school) when I wanted nothing more than to leave that town. Granted a huge part of that probably just came with being a teenager – but even so, there is also some negativity associated with that place during that time. I look back and sort of hate the person I was my senior year of high school, and I literally cringe with embarrassment when I think about it. Here’s the thing though, I wouldn’t be who I am right now if I was never that person. Even if that person sucked.
I am forever grateful I have that place to call home, because for the most part I loved my time in that town. I am learning to be grateful for the times that were less than great, because those moments also shaped me. Home to me isn’t just a place, and it isn’t just Mosca. It was my first home, and the place where (as of yet) I have spent the majority of life. Now when I say going home – sometimes it means Mosca, sometimes it means a house on the East Coast that I haven’t lived in yet. “Home” isn’t static, it changes as you change.
As I move on and transition out of this “temporary home” situation I’ve been living in since I left that house, my new home will gradually replace my old one. And that’s okay.
As always, I am but a work in progress.
Cheers.
