Home Sweet Home

After six years of apartment renting — and the nagging feeling always in the back of my mind that this is only temporary, not really my home — Greg and I are finally buying a house where we can put down roots. An adorable house with lots of indoor and outdoor space. High ceilings, a brick fireplace, wainscoting, shutters, and a "cottage/farmhouse" atmosphere I fell in love with at first sight. A front yard with a white picket fence, ready for lawn and roses. A back yard with a deck, a maple tree, and plenty of space for running around. A shaded side yard with a mossy brick path, where I'll plant my herb garden. I've been dreaming of it since I was about 8. I think I still have my herb signs to stick in the ground, identifying each plant. I can already picture a little dog there, the roses blooming and the trees shading our two beautiful babies. It feels like home.

They say home is where the heart is. For the five years before we moved to Oregon and before we had Ethan, I always felt like my heart could only call the place where I grew up my "real" home.

I grew up in the country, on 21 acres of land with few neighbors, and the two houses you could see from my home on the hill were those of family. We had a menagerie of pets over the years, including hamsters, rats, dogs, cats, rabbits, chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep, cows, goats, horses and wild turkeys. My dad's cousin, who lived right up the road, worked as a veterinarian for the San Diego Zoo, then the Charles Paddock Zoo. In her retirement, she keeps rescued wildlife such as tortoises, ferrets, zebras, camels and monkeys. And living in the boondocks where there are snakes, coyotes, mountain lions, deer and bears, we had our fair share of experience with wildlife. Believe me.

I guess I say all of this because I always imagined myself living in a place just like it. It was heaven. In the spring, there were horseback rides and wildflowers of every size and shape to pick, and thanks to my mom, we knew the names of many of them. In the summer, we would float down the Salinas River on blow-up sharks and canoes with the neighbors who lived there, where our dirt road ended. In the fall, the leaves fell, the frost came, and I would collect pinyon nuts or make acorn bread, because I liked to pretend I lived in times long past. And in the winter, we would build snowmen and sled down the hills because, yes, even in the hills of the Central Coast of CA, it snowed on occasion. Or we would explore the damage of the flooding rains down the canyon and the overflowing creeks filled with the goldfish we'd set free there — prizes won in Halloween Carnival games at school.

The truth is, a small part of my heart will always be with that childhood home in California. The greater part is here, growing into the wife and mother God means me to be.

Greg and I still dream of moving to the country in the not-too-distant future. But for now, we've found a place to call home — a place my heart can rest — and I can see us living in and loving it for a good long while. It will be nice to feel permanence, to feel settled, to feel like we can really move in and make it our own... because it will be.