Going Home

We'll soon be leaving California for our beautiful home state of Alabama. There are already boxes stacking up in the spare bedroom, and I've started bookmarking real estate listings. After living in three different states it's finally time to be home - to settle and plant tomatoes and bake bread in my own kitchen and drink sweet tea with friends from church and watch the fireflies flickering on a muggy evening. I won't have my own Christmas tree this year, but next year I'll buy the biggest tree I can fit in my house and put lights in the trees.

Lord please be willing.

I'm going to plant bulbs outside my windows and watch them come up in the spring. I'm going to have a place to spread out my projects and have six things going at once. We're going to put a pinball machine and a ping pong table in the basement and invite Allen's brothers over. I can't wait. I'm already going over paint colors in my head. I'm trying to prepare myself for a house that isn't perfect. I don't want all the pressure of "falling in love." Really though, I want to walk into a house and see the next ten years staring back at me in the windows. I want a place that says "Sure Yosemite was your refuge in California - this can be your refuge every day." Hard lines asking a house to live up to one of the most amazing national parks in the country, but there it is. I want to sunlight on the floor to be my Merced River and porch to be my Tuolumne Meadows. I bet that's one the real estate agent hasn't heard before!