The importance of home

I loved our family's old house with it's big open spaces. It's old fashioned windows let in a draft or two, the upstairs floor boards would creak at the touch of your foot. The pipes of the boiler would clang when you turned on the heating and the gas flame roared into life.

To me it was so much a part of my life, it felt organic. An old friend into whose welcoming arms I could sink after a hard day spent on the outside, in a disturbing world.

I came to love all of these stirrings and signs of life. To accept them as a form of communication from my home to me. "I'm feeling my age today" it would imply with the groan of boards under my feet, as I made my way to the bathroom. Or "Don't worry, I've got you." When I awoke from a bad dream, to the relief of flickering lantern light. Or when the protesting pipes pushed their hardest so that warmth flooded through every room, defying the cold dark scary places in the night.

I loved that wild and wonderful place and to my mind it loved me back. It was an ever present force filling a vacuum in which others had thongs of family and friends.
To this day I know it waits patiently for me to return. To brush my hand upon the entrance and to whisper my thoughts from my mind into it's eddying shadows.

Still my heart contains a place for that place. A place that speaks to my soul with words and feelings of comfort, of solace, of safety. In other words: of home.

Sturdy and dependable, like an old friend: the house was a permanent place for so long in my life. A haven in a sea of storms. The world outside might be cruel. People put there might not care of be understanding. But the house was always there. A bulwark against the storm.

A refuge where I could always find solace. Where there would always be a light left on by the family that cared about me. Where there were always people inside who I knew I could trust and that loved me.

Each room held a myriad of memories within its walls.

I think of them and even now the events play out in my mind.

The house was like a beloved friend and protector. I loved it and the memories my family made there. It represented safety and a place of love and kindness.

When we had to leave, it almost broke us.

Years later the image of that house occupies a space in my mind. I can close my eyes anywhere I am, and take a virtual tour of that safe space. I go there to meditate and to bathe in the warmth of nostalgia and important landmarks in my life.

Now the lights of my life are fading. The voices of the past grow distant. The stars of my family slowly wink out. I hold on to those memories we made there in that house together. They will keep me warm, long after the sun has gone down and when the shadows come for me.