Going Home

I woke up at 4:30 a.m. The dogs were barking in circles around the house. After I put them back up and closed the doggie door, I couldn’t sleep. It was a full blown funk... bouncing from one worry to another... thinking of all I needed to do that I hadn’t done... nothing new, but it felt different. This morning while I sweated out the funk in exercise, it came to me... my mother is not the only one losing home when she moves here this month. I am losing home, too. As I formed the words in my heart, the tears began to flow. Of course...duh... what took me so long to notice?
Home... the farm... my mother and daddy’s dream... the house they built... the greenhouse dream... planting the pasture sprig by sprig during the hot summer...the years of raising cattle and gardens and grandchildren... sunsets over cypress knee ponds and green hayfields... fishing with crickets... watching my parents walk and love the land and the cows... all the laughter and grief, hard work and tears, memories of sister and father will be no longer tied to one piece of this sweet earth. I am caught off guard... surprised by the intensity of my grief... the tears that keep running down my face as I write about this ending.
All the stories... the history of our family in that place now live only in the memories of my mother and me... having to plant the pasture three times because the summer was so dry we couldn’t water the fields enough by hand... picking butterbeans in the garden until I thought my back would be bent permanently...I remember what the new house smelled like when we moved in... my new bedroom painted yellow... how proud my mother was of her new kitchen... her dining room... the sound of the screech owl that lived in the woods in the side yard... the rattlesnakes that could often be found coiled under the clothesline in the back yard... my sister ... oh, dear God... my sister. My sister’s death in 1980, a suicide, changed my family patterns in so many ways. Everywhere I look in the house I see her... wearing those Villager dresses that she loved.... getting ready to move out to the college dorm.... coming home for supper because she couldn’t stand the dorm food... her pink bedroom at the back of the house is still full of her presence for me.
I am a grown woman with a home of my own for over three decades. I have mothered three children to adulthood and now celebrate the presence of four grandsons in my life. The family farm has not been my home since 1969 but it is still my home in my heart. How can I let go... let the natural order of life and death comfort me as I face the ending of my childhood home as I have known it?
The words from an old hymn help... Be still my soul: thy God doth undertake to guide the future as He has the past. Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake... All now mysterious shall be bright at last. These sweet words remind me that I can only see through a dark glass as I move into the future but the vision of the past... the sense of home... the place where my family settled for a short while in South Georgia... my childhood home will shine brightly in my heart and in the memories of my children. I give thanks for my parents... that farm in South Georgia... the dear memories I carry with me as we pack mother up for the move to our farm in North Carolina... for the gift of memory that will continue to warm my heart long after I leave my childhood home for the last time. To every thing there is a season... this is my season for letting go... going home...