LEAVING HOME

We left our home of eight years.  The table where we shared holiday meals with family.  The front porch.  The fire pit in the backyard.  Memories of recuperation and healing from surgeries.  The accessibility ramp, now removed.  We downsized.  I sold many of my vintage cameras.  Files of sermons, academic papers, cards, letters, notes and articles, work spanning many years, tossed out and recycled.  I sent boxes of photographs with childhood memorabilia to my daughter. Report cards, programs from high school band concerts, pictures with her friends, art work, a program from a Spice Girls concert. Not a word in return, unfortunately we remain estranged.

On a Wednesday morning, I received word of my mother’s death. She died alone in a nursing home. As I grieved her loss, no one came by the house to offer a hug, a touch, an embrace or a covered dish for consolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Just shy of two years, we finally had an appropriate service and fellowship meal at her church.  Friends, next door neighbors and a few congregational members attended. We shared stories and hugs. It was one of the last details to arrange before we moved. Down the street from the church, my childhood home where we snapped butter beans on hot summer days has been renovated, another family embracing a new beginning. 

With our dog in the back seat, we drove across country, not knowing where we would live.  We left in faith, wondering where we would land.  Father Richard Rohr writes: “Home is no longer a geographic place.  It is a place where everything belongs, everything can be held, and everything is another lesson and another gift.”  Now across country, miles from the James River and the Chesapeake Bay, the Alleghenies, the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah, I contemplate, and dwell in the gift of understanding home.   

Rohr, Richard.  Yes, And . . . Daily Devotions  Ohio:  Franciscan Media, 2019. p. 187.