I’m sipping an iced tea. I took part of the day off due to lack of sleep and waking up on the edge of a migraine, and struggling with pain somewhere around my sciatic nerve, between my spine and my hip. Uncomfortable. Tired. I was not up for a day of heavy cognitive workload, and would have been irritable and error-prone. No one needs that shit. Not me. Not my colleagues. Not my Traveling Partner. Light duty – just the essentials – and an early out made so much more sense.

The day is an odd one. Not “sunny” or “rainy” in any definite way – certainly a considerable portion of both, without a theme or pattern to grab hold of. Spring in the Pacific Northwest.

…Damn, my Traveling Partner makes a wicked good iced tea, I must say… 😀

I’m very fortunate. Not just for the iced tea, but for this life, this job, and this house in the suburban countryside on the edge of a large-ish small town. I sip my tea and think grateful appreciative thoughts, reflecting on the distance traveled in this one lifetime. I’ve certainly had it worse at other times in my life.

I think about “home” – and how very much at home I feel here in this place, secure and safe and wrapped in love; it’s not just a building. It’s not just a place I reside. It is “home”. It’s not perfect. It’s not spectacularly large or unusually luxurious (beyond those luxuries my skilled Traveling Partner has added to enhance our comfort, ease, and quality of life)… just a modest little house in a commonplace suburban neighborhood. Still home. Our home. My home. It’s comforting to feel so settled and secure, here. I yearned for this for so long… I’m grateful that it has more than met my (probably ludicrous) expectations of what “home” could be.

This morning there was an attractive earth-tone pottery planter half-filled with soil in a stand by the front door. It used to have my creeping thyme in it. That thyme has traveled with me awhile (one might say “a lifetime” lol), and it was a small sort of big deal to plant it into the front landscape, in the flower bed, on the other side of a favorite rose, near the large river rocks that used to be in my aquarium as décor. Doing so left that planter mostly empty of soil, and definitely empty of obvious life. Today, I planted a geranium in it – one with showy leaves that will have merry orange and red flowers. I don’t think I’ve ever grown a geranium, before. It wasn’t that I disliked them, I just… never did. I’d thought to plant a begonia in that pot… but the plant I saw, that pleased me most in that moment was a geranium.

So here I am. Settled and at home, on a rainy-sunny day, sipping iced tea… smiling about a geranium in a pot by the front door. 🙂 These are the sorts of things that make “home” more than an address. I mean… sure, I could have had a geranium in a pot on my patio at some other place/time… It’s not even about the geranium, itself. For sure it’s not about the pot. I’ve had plants in containers for a long while. It’s the choice. It’s the ability to plant into my garden, just anywhere I’d like, and know that it is mine, and will be mine tomorrow, and the day after that, and next year, and on into an unpredictable future. At least for some unmeasured while. That’s enough.

What matters most?

…This is good iced tea…

It’s time to begin again. 🙂