Home

Home is where the heart is.  But the human heart is boundless.  It is deep and broad and strong and fragile all at the same time.  It can break and heal, have scars and walls and nooks and crannies and all the love in the world.  The heart knows endless love, even when our smarts try to tell us otherwise.

Is it possible to have more than one home?  Can the human heart love that much?  I believe so.

For me, there is the home I was raised in.  The home where I learned to love, live and trust.  The home where I learned right from wrong and how to stand and walk this earth and just be me.  Where I shared my forming thoughts and feelings with those people who guided my footsteps on their path right into this great big world.  It is the place where I want to go when I am sad, to this day.  I want to hop on a plane and crawl into my mother's bed at dawn and just lie there until the world is a kinder place.

There is also the home I was so glad at first to leave behind because it no longer suited our needs. I came to realize I miss deeply.  I miss the familiarity.  I miss the short hallway and the tiny kitchen and the massive den where numerous craft projects have begun and most have died before they saw the light of day.  We truly started our lives together there, having moved in mere months after our wedding.  Both our babies were brought home to that light apple green room with the Peter Rabbit quilt, the white-wash-turned-paint rocking chair and the massive Winnie the Pooh on the wall that was still visible after layers of paint and primer.  It's one paw still completely missing the mark and somehow attached to its thigh.

The memories, good and bad, are all precious.  They are what makes it my home.  Someone else's mail gets delivered there now, but it is still my home.

We have started building a new home now.  The house stands, it was built in the early 90's, but the home is not quite there yet.  It will take awhile, but with every vegetable or shrub I have planted, my own roots have started shooting here.  With every book I unpacked, a little part of my soul moved in.  One by one my paintings, portraits and pictures are finding nails in the walls where they will rest, keeping watch over this new story being written.

And so my heart grows deeper, ever expanding to make room for the new home, the new love and all the new experiences it is bound to have.  It will keep growing with every new day and every new adventure, however small it may be, my heart will grow.  Sure, it will crack and break and take one hell of a beating every now and then, because we are human after all and sometimes we get hurt.  But as fragile as our hearts can be, they can heal and grow and love even more.  All we need to do is give it the chance.