Home

I am home right now. Sitting next to Henry and hearing him work through his math homework for the week.

"The petting zoo had 6 goats, 2 sheep, 1 pony, and 1 calf. How many animals were in the petting zoo?"

He wrote "9." ... missed it by one... I'll tell him in a second.

Nora is watching Mickey Mouse Clubhouse in the other room.

The dishwasher is making watery mechanical sounds.

Chaucer is at the door outside (better go let him in).

Both the bike that Henry got last Christmas and the one that Nora just got for her birthday are sitting ready to go in our living room. They just finished riding them in endless circles around the inside of the house. Henry got pissed because Nora is already a better rider than he is.

Ramses and Saul (our two cats) are curled up on my bed upstairs.

There are paperwhites growing on the window next to me in memory of my Grandma Bronson who recently passed away.

I never really thought I would get here. We don't have a big house, its a little white cape. A student I taught that lives down the street called it a "tiny, cute, little, white house." I told her that was too many adjectives.

It is surrounded by untamed woods on pretty much all sides. I still have yet to build up the courage to use a chainsaw. I have only tried once and the thing got bound up in the tiny little tree I was cutting down, and as it fell on top of me, knocking me to the ground (it was surprisingly heavy) it also broke the chain on my saw. I have never really got around to getting another one, or building my pride back up enough to try again.
( just told Henry that he got it wrong... he took it like a trooper. He's now spelling the words "World, something and different" by sound.)

There are comforts here. I still am looking for the overwhelming peace that I thought would come with owning a home. There is a lot of stress that I wasn't expecting. But I do like having this thing that I can mold as I see fit, or ruin as it may be.

Henry is done now, and Nora and he are riding in their circles again, right through the closet that I tore down to make a hallway, through the livingroom and what used to be the wall that divided the two bedrooms that we had downstairs before I built the upstairs ones, past the endtable that used to be red before I painted it blue and then painted it again a light tan color, (we still call it the "blue thing") past the new/old piano that we bought about a year ago and that I moved for the corner to be open for the christmas tree that we cut down at a neighbor's house and set up a month ago, and past the blocks that sit on top of it, that the McRells, our close friends, gave us that spell out H O M E.