Home Sweet Home

We moved a lot when our daughters were growing up. I've counted before, 18 addresses in 45 years. Not enough time to put down roots with many of the houses. Home should always be that place where memories are made. It has to be much more than four walls to feel like home and a Mother's job is to add the ingredients needed to make the warm and fuzzies.

If you reach back into your childhood those feelings are stirred when you remember how you felt in the security of those walls. It wrapped around you like a blanket and protected you from the outside world. I can remember my bedroom...the wallpaper was pink roses. I can see the white curtains moving gently with the cool breezes from a south window. It was an old house, on the corner of Summit and Division with a big wrap-around porch. Mom had the banisters full of pots of begonias and impatiens and ferns. I would set out in the swing and watch as neighbors mowed their lawns or walked to the neighborhood market. Inside, Mom was almost always in the kitchen cooking.

Since our daughters are eight years apart, their strongest memories would most likely be two separate houses. For Stephanie the house on Birch in Harrison is where she learned to ride a bike, celebrated many birthdays and wondered how Santa got in the house Christmas Eve since we didn't have a fireplace! For Amy the house at Horseshoe Bend is where she lost her first tooth, learned to swim and played long summer days with our dog Lizzie. It's not far from here, if you go by boat it's only a few coves away. It seems like such a long time ago that we lived on that little farm, 25 years can seem like an eternity while feeling like a "blink ago."

Every house had celebrations...holidays with family gathered, sleepovers with best friends and private "alone in their bedroom" time when they played and pretended and grew up. 

In their heart and minds will forever be the color of that bedroom or the pictures in the hallway. Etched in their memories are playing house or riding their bikes or just setting and dreaming about their future.

Home is as simple as the front door...

...or the sound of the doorbell~

It's that feeling of welcome and being the most important thing in your parents' lives. That is what being a Mother is, and a Father too. Forever that bond that never goes away, only gets stronger. Even when we are separated we hold those memories most dear.