washwords

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.

Too cheesy to say “where the heart is” ?

Probably. But it’s true.

I’ve been thinking a lot about home lately. Not just because Nablopomo told me to think about it – it’s their theme for June, but ABOUT home. About where it is, how you know it, how you hold onto it, how you move to be sheltered by it when it shifts.

It started with a trip home. Well, to the home where I grew up, the town I grew up. “my hometown…. this is myyy home town…” It was a trip to take my boyfriend “home.” So where you grow up? That must be home.

On that trip, I went literally home, back to the source, to THE home, the physical home where I grew up; the home, serendipitously enough, that one of my very bestest friends in the 3rd, 4th, 5th grades had just purchased… with her husband…. and baby.

It filled me with joy. Here was the home where she and I had played. She could teach her son that the evergreen tree was hollow inside if you poked in just the right way, that the basement cabinets made an excellent clubhouse, that the spot to the left of the staircase was perfect for spying on whoever was below.

V had been there when my dad passed the rule “no more dr. scholls.” Too many girls were getting the think wooden heels of those monstrosities stuck on our thin deck and being catapulted into the backyard! She was there for birthday parties, scavenger hunts, t ball games and trips to ground round for sundaes in baseball caps.

I couldn’t wait to see it.

But I also was afraid. This was the home where my father, and my memories of him, lived. And it was the home where he died, making the brightest and Read the rest of this entry »

Despite my fabulous spa vacation, and despite my snarkery about all things DC, in truth this is where I’m meant to be.

I loved relaxing on the beach, getting spa treatments and I’m grateful (SO grateful) to have the resources and time to treat myself so. I do feel refreshed in a way I know I desperately needed (the first clue was when I started getting annoyed, genuinely angry, at people asking me to do, you know, like WORK, at work). But… ultimately? the relaxed lazy meandering pace? not really for me. I’m a city girl at heart, at core, specifically a DC girl.

Getting back to town, we walked straight from gate to waiting cab to a heated treatise on what’s wrong with Read the rest of this entry »