Home is where …

Home is…where? Home is where your heart is. Home is where you wanna be when you’re not there. Home is where you sleep. Home is where when the wind slams a door shut and it locks…you laugh outloud and know right where to reach for the crochet hook to poke through the hole to unlock the door. 

I’m in the space the Mrs. has called “home” for just about 50 years. Twenty of those years I probably thought of it that way too. The last pair of years, her home has been wherever she could have me in her line of sight – we were here or there – but certainly joined at the hip. 

Last month we came to what I thought was the most “sacred” space with all her familiar stuff in just the right places (unlittered with my stuff) in order to go to a doctor’s appointment and another to get her hair cut and permed. On the first evening back when it was time for bed she said ,”Maybe we should get back home?”  I suddenly realized that that door of her memory had slammed shut behind her. We WERE in her home. 

Little did I know that the next morning’s events would fast forward my well-thought out plan to find her a more adequate care set-up before winter.  A few days in the hospital, lots of tests and zero definitive answers took her to a new place to lay her head. She’s got a full ride scholarship for a 20 day stay at a rehab facility – or in other words- 20 days for me to get a lot of ducks into a lot of rows. 

For some reason this morning I back tracked through years of blog posts to see where I was 8 years ago today. I think I’m in very familiar territory but I’m not sure yet. No one but God has a handle on when someone is home at long last.