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Home: Here and Beyond…

That Most Special of Places

   That little Kansas girl in the blue gingham dress had it right when she said there was no place like it. It is where the heart is. The place where, as Robert Frost wrote, if you have to go there, they have to take you in. Where you want to be for Christmas.

It is home.

We all have a perception of what is home. For some, be they the lucky ones, the feelings are positive, warm, a great place to be. For others, not so much.

I am one of the former. My parents did a terrific job of providing the security and comfort of a loving home. They didn’t really always have an easy time of it, but they were solid people in a very similar community.

It was a wonderful childhood they were able to offer me and my brothers. Always enough food, warm beds, hugs, clean clothes, good schools to attend.

                                                                                                        Tom Anselm

It was a home of which I have fond memories. St. Teresa of Calcutta noted that “love begins by taking care of the closest ones, the ones at home.” And there was plenty of that, for sure, as I grew up.

The Lovely Jill also had a fine home in which to grow up. Loving parents who sacrificed much to give her and her large crew of brothers and sisters the safety and security, nourishment and shelter, love and concern they needed. It is one of life’s small serendipity’s that our childhoods were spent a few miles and four years apart, with nary an inkling of each other’s existence, until the one day our paths converged.

And from that time to today, we have tried to emulate our parent’s examples. To give our progeny the home-field advantage, the foundation, the ‘place to come back to’, literally and figuratively.

Goethe wrote that “he is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.”

Peace was one of the things we strove for. It wasn’t always easy, but it was always effort well-spent. Good old Confucius said “the story of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.” We hope to continue writing chapters to that saga.

We all have a hometown; have eaten home-cooked meals. When we open the door, back from a journey, it is sweet, that home is. It may be ever so humble, or sprawling and grand. What matters is that we are there. That we can come back to it, no matter how far away we have been, or for how long. And when the time comes for that last door to open and we see the other side, we have the hope that we can walk across the threshold of The Big Home in the Sky.

Those poets of my early youth, The Beatles, did a song in 1969 called Golden Slumbers, based on the 1603 poem by the English writer Thomas Drekker. The lyrics and music paint a gentle picture of our final abode:

Golden Slumbers fill your eyes. Smiles await you when you rise. Sleep pretty darlin’, don’t you cry. And I will sing a lullaby.

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