Coming Home

{my grandmother holding Vesper a couple of months ago}

I’m heading home this weekend. Not my current home- real home. Where I grew up and people know me and my family waits with open arms. I get to sleep in my old bedroom and stay up late chatting with my mother. I get to give great big hugs to my dad and brother and hold the sweet hand of my grandmother. It makes my spirit swell that I get to take my daughter along with me so that she can experience all of these things too- all of these people and places and intangible things that I hold so tightly in my heart- things that have shaped the woman that I am today.


When I was a little girl we had plenty of wide open space to run and play and we ran wild all over every single inch of country that we could reach. Sometimes we would get too far away to hear my mother yell for us to come in for supper. So instead, she would take this old iron bell and stand on the front porch and ring it as loud as she could. We would hear that bell from our perch in a tree or our rustic fort in the woods and we would sprint home. It called us. We knew that wherever we were, that bell meant one thing: Home. Comfort. (FOOD!)

Now, as an adult, I still feel something calling me home every now and then. Sometimes I just get too far away and I need to turn back and make my way home.

It’s funny how we spend so much of our lives aching to leave the arms of our parents- to be free and make our own way. But then one day we wake up and realize we’ve been doing this “grown up” thing on our own for far too long. We have jobs and kids and spouses and responsibilities just like we wanted, right? And when did that happen anyway? Weren’t we just yesterday running through fields and forests and waiting to hear that bell call us home- praying it won’t sound too soon? Surely it happened while we were sleeping… all the things we wanted and held in such high esteem seem to have become obligations instead. Somewhere along the way we just… lost our way… we misprioritized and things got turned around… and sometimes it takes a trip home to put things back into perspective.


I’m blessed to say that I can go home because at home, I’m not anyone else but me. I’m my mother’s daughter and the sister to three rowdy boys and the granddaughter of a woman who has more love and kindness in her heart than anyone I’ve ever met. I am the very core of me- the foundation of who I have now become. I’m nobody’s boss or employee or maid or nurse or go-to gal… I’m back at the start- back where things still made sense. I’m just me- the wide-eyed, strawberry-blonde girl who hasn’t got it all figured out- not yet- sprinting toward the sound of that bell that calls me home.

I hope your weekend is extra lovely.

Xo,

Chels