Home

There are just so many little things that make home home.

You know?

And those things are probably a little different in each house.

You know when you have been away from home for a while – for a business trip or a vacation or a holiday or even just a long weekend?

And then you come home and you take a shower in your own bathroom with your own normal-sized shampoo and soap?

That’s the feeling I’m talking about.

I love that feeling.

I love that part of home.

The comfortable, familiar aspects of our literal house. The parts of our house that make this place a home . . . to us.

Like the favorite glass always on the ready inside the ice cube drawer.

And that hidden stash of m&m’s for Mommy. (Oh, man – that makes me just like my mom. I remember discovering her stash one day – it was inside the brown crock pot on the bottom shelf of the cabinet directly below the microwave. No. I never took any of her m&m’s. That is the truth.)

Knowing exactly how to shape the giant red slacker sack so that it forms both a pillow and a foot rest exactly suited to my body.

The scent of my current favorite shower gel- Burt’s Bee’s Fabulously Fresh. It smells like rosemary and peppermint. And it makes me want to take thirty minute showers. (That and the fact that the shower is the only place in the house the kids don’t really want to join me.)

The color scheme that just makes me feel . . . relaxed, comforted, ensconced. (I’m not attributing too much power to colors either. They matter. They really do.)

The fact that our kitchen almost always has all of the necessary ingredients at any given moment to make NeedleTips – should the occasion demand it.

Like the ability to write with chalk on all of our kitchen cabinets and half of our doors.

Enjoying the prism of colors when the light pours through the stained glass window Sally lovingly crafted just for our living room.

And the sound of the rain on the skylights, even if it completely overpowers any other sound during a rainstorm.

Oh and our sweet, bright school room of a sun room.

This Thanksgiving, we did not leave our house. We didn’t travel far.

We just stayed.

And enjoyed all these things.

We enjoyed home.

And it was good.

Ah! There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort. – Jane Austen