Home.

Not just any feather pillow, but my feather pillow.  The one that lulled me to sleep each night on the bottom bunk, body wrapped in a cocoon of untucked flannel sheets.  The feather pillow that was subjected to many an argument between my sister and me, always over the same thing: “I want the door open.”  “Well, I want it closed.”  “I want the radio on.”  “Too bad, I want it off.”  “You had it off last night.”

Home.

Not just any dining room table, but our dining room table.  The polished mahogany table that was annually blanketed with snowy flour and massaged year after year by wooden rolling pins as mounds of refrigerated Christmas cookie dough were flattened and re-shaped.  The table that proudly hosted cans of lighted Sterno beneath fondue pots that sputtered hot oil each Christmas Eve.

Home.

That patch on the bike path where I biffed on a stick while rollerblading, resulting in my inability to button my jeans for a week, for the bruised, swollen hipbone I had pocketed as a souvenir.  That patch on the beach where we used to spread our towels in the dark, lie on our backs with our hands folded behind our heads, and watch the midsummer meteor showers with ooh’s and aah’s.  That patch in the yard where the grass grew untamed in a perfect circle, sheltered by the trampoline that we hid under when the purple martins dive-bombed us in defense of their newly hatched young.

Home.

Saturday morning waffles with boysenberry syrup.  Hudsonville ice cream.  Dad’s chop suey.  Mom’s chocolate chip cookies.

Home.

This, for me, encompasses home.

But there’s more.

There has to be.

Home cannot be thirty-year-old bunk beds, because my boys sleep in them now, not me.  And while we are still blessed to shower the aging mahogany table with pencil shavings and eraser scraps, the Lord knows that the Christmas cookies and tubs of ice cream don’t last longer than a blink around here.  The rollerblades that were precarious then would be a death wish now, and the rusty springs of the trampoline disintegrated a lifetime ago.

Things change.  Life moves on.  Stuff breaks, gets thrown away, disappears.

There has to be more.

This is Day 2 of ‘Defining Home in 31 Days.’  Come back tomorrow to find out what that ‘something more’ is all about …

Photo credit: MadAdminSkillz