washwords

The real reason I’ve been thinking about home is that I might be leaving this one soon. This one, being downtown, “THE city” (sorry, nyc), my hipster dupont city girl pad, my newly-divorced-to-single woman pad.

And, to top it off, I might be moving to … Northern Virginia, land of my constant mockery lo these many months! Oh the horror!

But the thing is, ultimately, home is “who”. Home is who you love, where you love, and cliche’ or not, home is where the heart is. Absent “blue pearl” granite even, home is where my love is, where we both can be, and where we can be together. Home is love and I have found it.

Against the aqua of my curtains comes yellow so bright, I think it must be car lights. It is 8:20 p.m.

I open the curtain to see that no, it is the summer sky before a storm.

Yellow beams hit my curtains, pebbled sandy driveway, clean white stone of the walls of my building. The rain is coming.

Thunder literally rolls over the yellow green of grass, magnolia tree leaves, footprints.

Flashes of white that stab the earth and listen, wait.

I open the curtains wide to breathe in the wet wind.

When the rain comes, it is in drumming, pattering waves. I love the smell, the taste, the feel of the night from my room, the same storms I watched from a similarly yellow-lit blue room of my childhood.

The summer storm makes me feel something is coming. And anything is possible.

[Photo by “Soleil 1016” on Flickr]

I hold my niece against my chest, tight. She laughs – her eyes sparkling with her laugh. She shrieks with glee rolling over my leg, my arm, my fingers on my sister’s soft bed. “Hava” says E, my niece.

“Ba” I say.

“Ma ma mama ba, hava?”

“ka la” I answer.

She giggles, throwing her head back, pleased with the answer. She pulls herself up on the footboard pointing excitedly at the window “DA! BA!!!”

“Yes! Window! Sun!” I say, wanting desperately to know what she is trying to tell me. She seems to forgive my ignorance, choosing to plunk herself back on the bed and laugh and laugh and laugh. And then, she scrunches up in a ball, butt up in the air, closing her eyes, murmuring, giggling, singing, “hava? bama?”

I scoop her up, put her in her soft onesie p.j, sing her a song, rub her tummy, while she slurps down her milk and coos. I cover her in her pink knit blanket. i tell her I love her, more than anything, in the whole wide world, kiss her cheek, and tiptoe out.

I am not home. But I am home.