Home – (ob)SERVER

Every so often an overwhelming feeling washes over her. It comes out of nowhere, this feeling, surprising her with its intensity. It crashes over her like a wave on a windswept wintry beach, strewn with the debris and driftwood of emotions suppressed amongst the sand and broken shells. Just when she thinks everything is finally on track, she is blindsided by the longing.

She just wants to go home.

Only she doesn’t know where that is anymore.

It was once nestled in a valley with Cross Kopje standing sentinel over its beloved citizens. Like a guardian it watched over them until the thin veil of stability, security and content was rent in two. Torn apart like a tree severed by a lightening bolt in a storm of political upheaval. Lives torn asunder by hidden agendas, fear, civil war and betrayal. Families scattered across the world, the longing for what was following them like a shadow for the rest of their days.

It was once at the foot of the majestic Hottentots Holland mountains flanked by the ever changing blue-grey of the Atlantic Ocean.
An enclave of natural splendor that leaves her breathless at the memory.
The smell and sound of the ocean invading her senses like a tonic of glory and grace, pulsing through her veins with each beat of a silent African drum.
The mountains creating a glorious backdrop as the sun set and the moon rose in its yellowy-white fullness. The ebb and flow of light marking the passage of time.
The reds, browns and oranges of endless vineyards creating a vivid tapestry of Autumn colors.

She has lived in other places, but a permanent address doesn’t make a place home.

A hill overlooking the Thames in the shadow of the grit and grime of London bustle.
The sparse, dull, depressing, brown, flat land of a Fort Worth suburb.
The lush green forests of a Southern college town hidden in the hills of the Blue Ridge mountain range.
And most recently, it is the rural forested, cranberry-bogged small New England community that, at last, at last, has started to feel like the closest thing she has had to a true home for years.

She needs this. This house of her own. This garden of her own. To plan and plant and nurture. This place to really make her own. This place to let her creativity flow after so many years of lying dormant.
The moving is done, for the time being at least. And finally there is a chance to put down some metaphorical roots.

She has her own family now. Two beautifully handsome, intelligent, funny, passionate, rambunctious boys, like blank canvases, they are ready for the artist of life to continue the mural that she has begun.
She, along with their dad, is their home now.

Yet as much as she strives to make a home for her family, her heart is always filled with longing for the people she has left behind. And every so often, the little-girl-lost feeling surfaces.

She is thirty-something now, with forty making it’s slithering crawl through the Forest of Time, inevitably about to catch up with her. But some days all she wants is her mom and dad.
She is grown up, independent, and yet she still sometimes feels like an imposter in this world of adulthood and responsibility.
She is worn down by the weight of duty and sacrifice.
Yet that is what motherhood and being a wife is about for her. A series of choices and circumstances intertwining and interlocking to make an impenetrable path of loyalty, love, honor and integrity.