Home

  If no one lives in a house, does it still accumulate dust?

  It's strange in our house right now.  Most of the pictures are off the wall, and we boxed up the TV today.  We don't watch much TV, but for the last 5.5 years it has stood sentry over the fireplace, ready to light up the room.  My two Ansel Adams prints have followed me everywhere for the last 13 years, and they no longer frame the kitchen cutout anymore.  So many places around the house are barren, devoid of the things that have made this house our home, and each day the house looks more and more like it did on the first day we walked into it, before it was ours.

  And it gets me thinking about home.

  Houses are concrete things, very definite places with walls and windows and dust and spiders.  Home, though, is more abstract.  Home is the place where the soul rests, where the rapid pace of life slows a bit as your feet ascend onto the couch.  Home is the place where you bring your newborn for the first time, and home is the place where you watch them grow.  Home is a place where a marriage, a partnership is made.  Home has roots deep in my heart.

  It's not hard for me to leave behind this house.  I'll miss my blueberry bushes, and the basement I finished.  I'll miss the light streaming in through the windows and our great neighbors.

  The hardest part is the memories, the moments that have made this house into our home.  I'll take those with me, and we'll make a new home in Columbus, but it's just a strange thing, one I can't quite grasp, that makes it so hard to leave this home behind.  It's been home for so long, and I feel like part of me belongs here.

  It's home.