This Place Called Home

Last week, I drove back to the old neighborhood where I grew up, where my parents lived across the street from a military academy, where I met my future husband. In the place of a once stately house where the head of the school lived, a skeletal structure under construction with a three-car garage jutted up from the ground. The towering oak that used to be there was gone, too, sacrificed, no doubt to the fledgling McMansion. Across the street at the chapel, my parents are buried, an American flag commemorating my father as an honorary Brigadier General in the Pennsylvania National Guard.

Under that tree more years ago than I care to remember, John and I sat in a field lit up with fireflies. We talked about marriage. Like most young couples, we weren’t sure about ourselves or this commitment. We had to get through the impetuous outbursts, and the naive lust of youth, but like those fireflies our lights attracted and chemistry prevailed. I remember the sweetness of the moment more than any words that sultry summer night. I didn’t need to know what would come, nor would I have wanted to, if I could, nor would he, although he was the strongest, most courageous person I’ve ever known.

The heat these last few days has been intense. We take in each summer day with little energy Lily and I. She doesn’t want to eat. After adding canned rice and chicken to her kibble, she ate again, but her age reminds me we don’t have much longer. Labs can live to be thirteen or fourteen, and she’s going into her eleventh year.

I’ve lived at the same address for thirty-five years, raised my sons here, and had four dogs who played in the backyard. One is buried near the hydrangea by the shed.

I could always say my home was a green part of the world where horses grazed, where farmhouses and silos caught the afternoon light and shadows. It was a good place to raise two boys on my own. Yet, with each passing year, the traffic encroached on the fields and farms with more ferocity, and after storms, the water from rainstorms rushed down creeks and streams from parking lots and widened highways. The remnants of Revolutionary War sites vied with a crush of new hotels and apartment buildings, each one looking just like the other. The family-owned pizza parlor closed.

This July, a family of deer stands sentinel among tall grasses near a parked backhoe. A two-million-square-foot warehouse is slated to replace a working farm, and bulldozers and tractor-trailers will follow something I wrote about. It’s a sad irony, if it is Amazon, as some suspect. My books, my salvation these years, are available through purchase on Amazon. Since they often don’t stock self-published authors’ books in bookstores and libraries, what choice did I have? So, I remain a small cog in the online shopping wheel in a country obsessed with buying “stuff” stocked in monstrous warehouses.

Yet despite obstacles and challenges over the years, my little garden grows, the birds wake me every morning with a sweet chirp of hope, and at sunset, the sky blooms with patches of peach and rose. There’s nowhere I have to be unless I want to go.

Would I advocate stopping the madness, writing letters, attending meetings, and preserving the land as open space if it weren’t for the birds? If it weren’t for the sunsets of God’s hand that paint the sky year after year? And the memory of one man who said he loved me?

As time marches on, so does the awareness if we’re lucky to remember the precious moments. We remember the ones who mattered. We realize what we value. We jettison the “stuff” and enjoy if we can this place called home.