Home. Home, sweet home. Home is where the heart is. There’s no place like home. West Virginia.

After an incredibly long delay in Cleveland, my brother and I finally fell in our beds at 1:30 this morning which was 3:30 Eastern Time. Then up early and another 4 hours’ drive with stops along the way before I got Gary to his place. He is a wonderful traveling companion. He reads the road signs, has interesting thoughts for conversation, and is so easily pleased he made traveling a joy. As most of you know, Gary has a developmental disability which he has really been able to work around and learn to live as independent a life as possible. He came to live near me 9 years ago after our mom died. I asked him if he accomplished all he wanted to do in his trip and his answer really surprised me. He said he felt he finally “got WV out of his system”. After many attempts at trying to explain what he meant, I eventually understood that Colorado is the home of his heart now and he is certain he would not be happy living in West Virginia again. I can understand that. He has a life here that he most certainly would not have achieved had he remained in Parkersburg. As a matter of fact, he told me today that if he would have stayed there after mom died, he more than likely would be living in a nursing home now. The reality of that wrenched my heart because it is true.

We drove along in silence for awhile and I told him, while he had discovered the home of his heart is truly Colorado, I had solidified that the home of my heart is West Virginia. I cried when the plane crossed the Ohio River and I touched the ground of “home”. I slept the deep sleep of contentment in my grandma’s bed, listening to the creek out the window and the rain on the tin roof. I photographed everything that I wanted to etch in my memory, as if these things weren’t already permanently embedded in my DNA. I started crying three days before we left just at the thought that I might not be at the farm again, or at least, the clock is ticking. My beautiful, eloquent, erudite aunt is 80 now. She lives at the family farm. She is the last sibling to live there. The others have their own places. Even though I LIVED in Parkersburg, I was RAISED on this farm and it is my home. I have lived in Colorado for 38 years. Doesn’t matter. When I think of “home”, it is this farm. It is my heart. I know every turn in the road, every contour of the land, every sound in the hollow. Just the smell of the earth, the rain, the trees, the flowers, are enough to send my heart soaring. This is my home. My earliest memory is at the table on my grandma’s knee. I shut my eyes and I can see the little girl I was, running to catch lightning bugs in a jar, setting up the moss and the acorns on “Tea Table Rock” with my cousins and our dolls, smushing over-ripe strawberries into my mouth with fat little-girl hands…juices dripping from my fingers and chin. This is my home. This is the place where my beloved Pop-Pop lay in his coffin for three days, resting under the living room window, with my grandma ever vigilant beside him. This is where I learned to cook, to quilt, to can. This is where I learned about God, learned to pray, to go to church, to be a good person. This is where I brought my babies to be rocked and loved on and spoiled as only grandmas can do, where they combed their “Big Grandma’s” hair, and took moon baths by the rain barrel on hot August nights. This is my home, it flows through my veins as surely as my lifeblood.

I am certain that these things hit me more deeply this trip because my heart is still tender, my feelings still raw and open after losing the other part of my heart in March. I have already lost so much, must I also lose my “home”? It happens to almost everyone, I suppose. There comes a time when things of the past are just that…the past. I have my children, my grandchildren, my brother, my friends here in Colorado. I have built a life here. But forever, and for always, this farm will be my home.