Home at last

It’s funny the little things that will make a house a home – the perfect pillow, the mug the kids gave you for Mother’s Day twenty-some years ago, your own computer, hooked up and ready for blogging.

I crossed the Mississippi River from my native state, Illinois, to my new state, Missouri , two weeks ago, just a few hours after turning our previous home over to its new owners. 

We’ve had this house on the Lake of the Ozarks for a while now, knowing that we’d be moving here once the other home sold, so we had belongings here – extra clothes and dishes and furniture. When we came down for weekends from time to time, it was our “home” for a few days, but not really, if you know what I mean. 

Even now, having all of our belongings “on site,” though not all unpacked, the new home still just didn’t quite feel like home – and I couldn’t put my finger on it. 

We had the furniture in place in every room except my office, which is awaiting new flooring and bookshelves. We had our clothes in the closet and our dishes from “home” all unpacked and put away. I’d been nesting like crazy, unpacking special keepsakes from our kids, parents and grandparents and finding the perfect spots for them. I’d planted flowers and started powerwashing the decks.

In ways large and small, I was trying to make it home. I was sleeping on my special feather pillow again, but something just wasn’t right. 

I wrote one blog post shortly after I arrived here, but try as I might, I couldn’t get the next one out.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have a computer. Though my desktop computer wasn’t hooked up, I could have used my husband’s computer or my work laptop. After all, I was putting out a news page every day on it. It wasn’t that it didn’t work.

I could make excuses that I’m too tired or too busy, and those cop-outs just might work. Moving isn’t as easy when you’re approaching 60 as it was at 21 or 25 or 45 or 48. 

But, what it really was, I think, was that something just wasn’t right. This place wasn’t home yet.  So, I unpacked a few more boxes, nested a little more and set up my own desktop computer.

Aha, that’s what I needed – the place where I feel most comfortable putting my words on paper – my very own keyboard. 

That – and the pink mug I unpacked that says “Mother” in a bunch of different languages.  This may not be the house where I raised my kids, but I do believe it has become home at last.

© Ann Tracy Mueller 2012 

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