Home

Home: such a foundational concept. A red brick house with a bay window from which to press our noses watching for Mom to come home, or be the first to see the school bus in the morning. A porch light on until all the kids are safely in their beds. A “Welcome Home” sign on the garage door. The place of comings and goings.

Home: Bread baking, Tide, willows, leather tack in the barn, tomato vines; windows open, curtains blowing in fresh air; lying under a fresh Christmas tree’s pungent sap aroma while squinting eyes to make multicolored lights flare out in all directions. Hay stacks. Certain smells evocative of innocence and family.

Home: “Annie I Over,” Fox and Geese, Sorry, Mumble Peg with pocketknives, picnics on Grandma’s lawn with food on metal trays and cousins. Walking fences, running along cement ditches. Chores. Corners for reading. Books and magazines everywhere. Those mundane moments that accumulate and become life.

Cedar City was home. Moving my senior year was traumatic. Who was I if I was not Dave and Millie’s granddaughter, Mid and Tom’s niece, Brad and Mary Ellen’s cousin, the girl in the orchestra, Suzanne’s little sister? I defined myself by being a happy farm girl in a small town near the red hills and canyons that I loved. In Yakima I was an unknown homesick girl with glasses and braces in a nondescript house that I did not consider “home.” Letters kept me alive that year and I escaped to Southern Utah as soon as I could.

When I married Jay, it was partly his home that attracted me: a white farmhouse with a wonderful staircase with railings looking down and a long hall with a dartboard at the end and evidence of many, many darts that didn't quite hit the target. It was a house crammed full of history and life and a big kitchen table that was the scene of thousands of games of Rook and 14 on a Corner. Ice cream and burnt peanuts.

So what was I to do with the idea of being an Air Force Wife for twenty years?! I lost count of the houses we lived in during those years, but we did live in Washington, Utah, Texas, Mississippi, Illinois, Germany and the Philippines, and in most of those places in at least two different houses. How could I create "home" with no specific house to put it in? I eventually landed on two sustaining thoughts. First, home is where the family is. An apartment in Germany where we could walk to the little market where they were always eager to see our little blonde-headed Shawn and give him a piece of weiswwurst, a World War I barn house on stilts on the parade ground at Clark Air Base in the Philippines where we could walk to the Officers' Club Pool every day or eat Mongolian Barbecue on Thursday nights, a brick home in Mississippi across the Biloxi Bay Bridge where we'd see fishermen and women with poles and buckets for their catch each morning and near where we'd buy shrimp straight from the ocean, a  corner house ("It has stairs!--an upstairs and a downstairs!" the kids excitedly told everyone.) in Illinois that became the neighborhood tornado shelter when necessary, a little cinderblock home on Williams Air Force Base in Arizona with a community playground just beyond our patio that was watered by flooding periodically and where our dog, Louie, would insanely throw himself in front of the spurting hydrant responsible for creating a 5 inch pool of water to revive the Bermuda grass that I initially considered a weed and tried pulling it all out. Home is wherever our family lives.

The second saving thought was one I painted on a cutting board at Relief Society. (Suzanne was visiting and painted a design that, in retrospect, I remember as being similar to Mexican pottery.) Mine said, "Bloom where you are planted." Indeed. I learned that I needed to be able to bake bread (an oven), wash clothes (a bathtub did the job for most of the year we were in Germany), explore (we discovered some military recreation areas wherever we lived and generally hunted down places to enjoy with the kids), and attend church. If I had those basics, and my family, I could bloom. Jungle, desert, city, country. East, west, north, south. If I can participate in an LDS congregation, bake bread, wash clothes and have fun, I can be home. I can bloom, because I can make friends. I can bloom because I can contribute. I can bloom because I can learn new things. I can bloom because I can be comfortable anywhere life takes me.