Today I’ve been sitting in the swing, when the winds calmed down, thinking about how happy I am to be at home. Didn’t want to live here without Chief because he was my home but I’m beginning to feel like I’m home. I grew up in this house with three brothers and considered it home till I left Roanoke in August of 1979 and moved to Alexander City. I made a home there in a small apartment that I loved to go home to after work each day. Two years later I married and made my home with Chief in his father’s art studio. Our house was at the end of a dirt road, only a wood stove for heat, windows that propped open with sticks. That was my home with Chief and I loved every minute of those years in the woods. All three of our children came home from the hospital to that home. We had chickens and rabbits and ducks and cats and dogs. We were in the city limits but far enough off the road to feel like it was the country. Our children ran around in their underwear, happy as country urchins, barefoot with the chickens.

When Stew was four we moved from the woods to Chief’s family home. I painted all the walls, pulled up the shag carpet, and proceeded to make it a home for us. We had central heat and air conditioning (which we seldom turned on), a formal living and dining room that I loved, and a library for all our books. We slept in the library which had a wood burning fireplace, very romantic on cold winter nights. We lived there for 26 years. Several months after Chief died I came back home to Roanoke. He often told me, “When I’m gone, go home to your family. Go back to Roanoke. You’ll be fine.” Well, I came back to Roanoke. I left our home in Alexander City before the moving van came. I could not watch the house being undressed of all the things I shared with Chief.

Here at my home in Roanoke, I’m surrounded by his cameras and books and encyclopedias and manual typewriters in my lady den. He called the den the writing room and it was where he composed his poetry and worked on his book of Alabama county courthouses. Lots of photos of Chief and our families and the flag from his funeral rest on his grandmother’s piano. So he is here with me. And I have all the memories of the weekends we shared here for years. He loved to come here on the weekends. He’d always say, “Mama, going to Roanoke for the weekend is like a vacation.” He would be so happy living here, too.

I was trying to define the word home today while I pondered in the swing and I think home could be a tent on the mountain side or a one room apartment if you are where you feel you belong. Home is actually the place we reside. Home is a safe haven and a comfort zone. A place where we live with our families and our pets. The magic of our homes is that we love to leave them and go places but it feels so good to come back.

Love resides in our homes and our friends are always welcomed. I think our homes are the starting places of memories and hopes and dreams. Our homes give us a sense of peace where we can be ourselves. We feel safe and secure in our homes.

I love this quote by Lin Yutang about home, “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”