The Search For Home

My whole life has been a search for home. As a teen, refugee from violence and alcoholism in my childhood home, I gazed at perfect little cottages with white picket fences on my way to school. My longing for Normal Life was so great, the sight of milk bottles on the porches brought me to tears.

As an unhappily married young woman, I wore off the wheels of several baby buggies, pushing my children through long autumn afternoons, looking at houses I passed, dreaming of a home of my own that held happiness inside its walls. One especially unhappy night, walking across the city, I saw, in one window, a young woman reading, looking up with a smile as a young man brought her a cup of tea. A dream, a promise, of a perfection that never was to be mine.

I had three homes, and lost three, in my life.  I had to build my home inside myself, and carry it along, as a sand dollar creates its home from the sand and grit around it and carries it within.

In the second half of my life, my home has been a place, not a dwelling. Tofino has been the home of my spirit, in years when I lived here and years when I didn’t. Now, when I am away from home, my heart lifts, knowing it is waiting for me on return. When the bus points its nose up and over the mountains, with joy my eyes bless every tree and hill and cloud, all the way home.

How fortunate I am to live in the one place on the planet that is home to me. With such gratitude my eyes drink their fill of the beauty, the sights and sounds so dear to me, my whispered “thank you” a constant refrain -  thankfulness for Home, found, lost, and found again.

Inspired by the prompt at Telling Tales with Magaly: a Pantry of Prose.