Stability

This afternoon I drove down the mountain to visit my parents. My parents have been married 51 years (last week) and still live in the same house that they started their married life in three months after the marriage (they spent the first three months living with my grandparents while re-modeling the house). I love "going home" to visit with them. The home place looks very much like it did when I was growing up. The garden is in the same spot, the barns are still there, the house looks pretty much the same except my mother can grow flowers - who knew! Her mom had a green thumb and it wasn't until my brothers and I were grown that we learned our mom has a green thumb.

As I sat outside in a rocker listening to the goats "baaing" in the background and trying to get my dog that is still afraid of people who now lives on the farm with my parents to eat a piece of bologna from my hand I realized that my former home represents so much to me. I can almost see my brothers and me hauling in the firewood from the little wooden shed in the back (where my dad now houses his restored 1930 A-model); hear my dad as he says to the mule Jim "gee", "ha" as he plows the garden or look at the barn where the goats are and remember when I was 8 how dad told my brothers that we were supposed to feed the two pigs he just put into the barn daily. Yep - Oscar and Meyers the two pigs that we fed daily and loved were where the goats are now. One day cold winter day we came home, rushed out to feed them only to discover that they were that night's dinner. We were so mad at our dad that he never kept the hogs in that barn or allowed us to make pets out of the livestock again.

I know there will be a time when the family place will not be occupied by my parents or even family and while that makes me a bit nostalgic I also recognize that my family home represents a certain stability that I was so fortunate to have had. Sometimes I regret that my own children don't have a "family home" to go home to, but I also know that they have Rob and me. What I mean is that hopefully Rob and I represent stability to them. While we have moved what did I say in that first blog - something like 10 times our children were in several different schools in three consecutive years (one in middle and one in elementary) - that they do recognize that Rob and I are stability for them. Oh I won't even pretend that life as a married couple has always been easy - seriously??? I mean do you think it is easy when he would travel three weeks out of the month leaving me at home with two elementary age kids (especially a 3rd grader), but the important thing is that they know we do love each other and have been able to work through issues. As Rob once told our son when our son tried to cause a little trouble, "son, one of these days you are going to be grown and leave us - I plan to be married to your mom for a long time - so don't even think you are going to cause trouble between us." One of the many reasons I love my husband! Okay...enough of being - well - gooey!

TTFN!