We’re just on the other side of another marathon holiday season.  Christmas celebrations this year meant we traveled to three different family gatherings three days in a row.  While we greatly enjoyed spending so much quality time with all of our families, I think all three of us breathed a small sigh of relief as we unlocked the door and stepped back into our own house.  Evidence of our Christmas morning gift giving was still present throughout the house, and Lincoln was finally able to sit down and enjoy all of his new toys.  He’s so exhausted, though, that he’s fairly well consumed with watching Mickey while strangely crossing his arms like an old curmudgeon.  

What is it about your house that is so darn comforting?  Is it the building itself?  Is it the fact that it contains all the stuff that we all use to define our existences, as much as we’d not like to admit that?  Is it merely because it’s familiar and we’re, at some level, all creatures of habit?  We’ve been with people we love for the past four straight days.  We’ve been well fed, wearing our own clothes, and all together as safe as could be.  But even with all that, nothing seems quite as comforting as sitting on my couch, listening to yet another episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, surrounded by the giant mess that we’ll have to inevitably clean up once Linc goes to bed.  It’s pretty damn great, actually.

Tonight I went to check on our hoop house flowers (which are strangely getting ready to bloom, by the way) once we got home.  As I rounded the corner of the shed and saw our old house braving the wind and rain as it has been doing for over a hundred years, I was reminded of when we first moved in and this place still felt like a strange, expensive dream.  The rooms were full of our stuff, our beds were made with our own sheets, but for those first couple nights our home was still somewhere else.  We were scared and thrilled and ready for an adventure, but we still felt like we were living in someone else’s house.  But then, without us even noticing it, this place became home remarkably quickly.  And tonight, as our little creek continues to recede after being swollen with these December rains, our rooster annoyingly cock-a-doodle-dos from the coop, the clothes dryer in the kitchen (of all places to put that….) hums and clanks with a load of now clean clothes, and I continue to avoid cleaning up from our first Christmas on the farm, I can’t think of a place I’d rather be.