I am home. It will never really be my home–it belongs to more than me. My Grandpa built this house, and it is a house that has to be loved in order for it to continue to exist. I do love it: when I wake up and look across to the golden hillside in the fall, or I see the kids playing and having fun. I love this house because I have come to it as long as I can remember, and my kids now play with the same toys that I did. This is house is unique: thick cement walls, vast storage areas, and trellis on the ceiling. Right now, it is a rectangle that we live in, no doors separating us. But we don’t mind, really. The kids run outside or hide under beds. I discover stuff in closets and pull out bags to sort it. I think of plans to change it and yet I am sort of happy with how it is right now. Completely imperfect, and yet we can exist here.

I can throw away my moving boxes now. I can tear things apart and put them back together again. No one else will live here. No one else will fix the problems. I have lived temporarily for so long I am not sure how to adjust to permanency. It is new and weird to me, and maybe it will never really feel totally permanent at all. It will just be my life, day after day. And maybe when I have combined what was with what I have created, it will become so much a part of me that I won’t even consider it anymore–home as an afterthought, because home feels so right.