Home Sweet Home

I was thinking today how, if I ever had to, except to go Home, home, how I'd ever leave this place.

Oh, I know houses can be rebuilt, and it's not the  house, exactly I'm talking about. Even though I took a Queen Anne floor plan, wiped it out and did my own floor plan - one that we could afford in size - it still isn't the house itself.

It's what's made it a home during the last twenty-eight years.

For instances we have my great-great- (and maybe one more great) grandmother's rosebush in the yard. My grandmother passed it on down to me. We also have a variety of bushes from my mother's, Husband's mother's and grandmother's yards.

Husband sketched a blue bird nest with babies in it, nestled in a tree branch, with mama bird flying in to feed them, right above the door coming into our bedroom.

Some of the tiles above my cook stove were sketched and fired by Husband, depicting my favorite childhood story. I have Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox and the Tar Baby. My granddaddy used to tell me that story while I followed him in the garden: sunlight filtering through the high corn stalks with early morning light while he picked beans.

Each stair on the staircase is slightly worn and of a different color as we have traipsed up and down them a zillion times. For if I need something and I was downstairs, it was upstairs, and if I was upstairs it was, of course, downstairs.

The window blinds in our bedroom have a slight bend and tiny holes at the bottom of one of the slats. That's where I caught Daughter standing, biting on it, when she was trying to cut a tooth.

And inside the pantry wall are marks. Daughter was "this tall" at two, "this tall" at six, "this tall" at nine, "this tall" at thirteen, "this tall" at seventeen, "this tall" at twenty-one and now, "this tall" - the same as me.

How could I say good-bye that all that?

I am a rich woman, who doesn't wish to lose her treasures.