Home is where...

Home is where your heart is.  Home is where your stuff is.  Home is where you hang your hat. Home Sweet Home.  It's 5 am, and we're all up with jet-lag.  Everyone is cheerful.  Happy to be home.

この物語はホームについてです。最近日本に帰った、６週間でアメリカに離れました。今ジェットラーグをあるので、頭が弱くなった、少し日本語を使うことができます。（笑）

This summer's "homeleave" was more ambitious than usual.  6 weeks away, renting the mini-van and driving over 3000 miles (which doesn't count the ferry ride across Lake Michigan) significant time in 5 different locals, family traveling to meet us, great visits with special friends, my broken arm, Dr. visits with 3 different orthopods in 3 different states, Martin's work...  I'm still amazed that it mostly went off as planned.

Before leaving, Martin moved most of our plants to one area on the porch and engineered a kind of watering reservoir which collected the rain and kept them thriving all summer.  It was a nice welcome home.

This is our old house.  While we were in Tennessee, we drove by  where we used to live.  We lived there for seven years.  Then five years ago, in order to move to Japan, we sold the house.  It was really difficult to leave there.  It was a special home.  We did so much work to that house.  No kidding, Martin actually put a basement in under the house, later, reconfigured the walls and roof to make a Great Room from the kitchen and LR.  I had amazing huge and productive vegetable and flower gardens.  We planted an orchard, and many other trees.  Martin worked and worked on improving the lawn.  He cut several holes in the house and installed various windows, doors and skylights.  I learned how to cut and lay ceramic tile and tiled the kitchen, 2 bathrooms, floors, fireplaces. During this time, I worked at the Hospital in ER and CCU.  Martin worked at Saturn.  We raised four kids in that house, as Jay was 13, Steve 11, and Monica an infant when we first moved to Tennessee.

Now, when we see that house, it is a bittersweet feeling. The new owners haven't changed it at all.  The trees have grown.  The fruit trees are bearing, loads of apples, peaches, pears.  We planted them as whips, Martin, Jay, Steve and I, on Thanksgiving, 1994 and nurtured them along, but the fruit didn't start until after we moved, naturally.  Every year we would buy a root-ball Christmas tree and then would plant it in the yard after Christmas, so there's several lovely tall pines that hold special memories only to us.

So now we consider Tokyo our home.  That seems strange in some ways.  Here is a place where we don't own a house, we can barely speak the language, we know it is temporary... and yet, it is home. 

Comments

[Matt Scholl]

I'm happy to see that you've made it back to your current home. I really enjoyed our visit with you and Martin, hope to do it again sometime.

This post hits me, we are between homes right now and feel disjointed. I drove by our old house the other day and they have let a bunch of weeds grow in my rock garden. I should buy it back to fix it.