Home Sweet Home

I just returned from a vacation, and the closer I got to home, the more I couldn’t wait to be home. After a marathon day of driving, I wasn’t longing to be in a hotel, I wanted my own bed, my own place. I wanted to be home.

There’s a reason people say, “Make yourself at home.” It’s because home is the place where we feel the most comfortable. It’s the place we want to be. 

On my vacation, I visited the home where my grandma spent her summers as a young child. She said it was the happiest time in her life. 

The structure was over 100 years old. It had never been painted. Never had glass windows, perhaps not even a door. The family slept upstairs in the loft area open to the cool night air. 

I walked around and took pictures, imagining an 8-year-old girl and her family working and playing together.

Their mother had to get water from a nearby spring to wash dishes and clothes. The laundry was spread out on the wild rose bushes to dry in the sun. No one worried about bathing except once a week. The children went without shoes all summer as they worked and played alongside their parents. Through the Homestead Act, their family had to live on 160 acres and prove that they could grow crops. After 3 years the land would be theirs. 

I could imagine my grandma living her summers that way. Playing in the dirt, and helping her father with the farming and her mother with the canning and laundry. 

When I picture my grandma in her childhood home, I see a happy place because of her parents. They were happy together. They were working and building the life that they wanted. They worked hard and they enjoyed being together. They loved their children and enjoyed teaching them and caring for them. 

An outside observer once said that this family was the most destitute they’d ever seen. But my grandma never spoke of that time as being poor or sad. Those were her happy days.

After Daddy got his ground cleared and a granary built we would spend the whole summer on our land. We had a big old black wood cook stove outside. The bedroom was the loft of the granary and the living room was the whole outdoors.”

All too soon those days were over when my grandma lost her father and then her mother within a few short years. That time together became even more precious in her memories. By the time she was a teenager, she was an orphan. 

When her father died, life became harder. Her mother struggled through the grief and did what she could to support her family. They left the homestead and moved away to be closer to her father and extended family. When their mother passed away, the children were split up to be cared for by relatives. They would never again live together in one home. 

The picture of my grandma’s homestead cabin reminds me that home isn’t just a place, it’s also a feeling. It’s a sense of belonging, a sense of being comfortable in your space, being content. I can’t imagine being comfortable in that 100-year-old building now but I can imagine how hopeful and exciting it was when they first built it. When the wood was fresh and each nail they pounded represented hope for their future success.

As I drove through the night and longed to be home, I thought about what makes us want to be home. Why do we put up signs and doormats that say, “Home Sweet Home”?

Is it the home that’s sweet, or is it the life we’ve created? I believe it’s not so much where we live, but HOW we live.

Tonight, when I sleep in my comfortable bed with the much-appreciated air conditioning instead of open windows, I want to remember to create that much “sweet” in my home, so that the memories made here are the happy kind. 

It’s not where we live; it’s how we live.