Whether I’ve been away for ten minutes or ten days, I love coming home. Home is where I belong, where my wife and I entertain our friends, where we lay our heads down at the end of the day. Our home is hardly a castle—we call it “Standing Room Only’ for a readily apparent reason—but it is a place of safety and retreat. Snug. Cozy. Peaceful—at least most of the time.
By now, you may have read about the front porch, or the burglar step, or the fire pit that keeps us a little warmer on cold nights. Those features are certainly part of the quirky charm of our home, but what makes me love coming home isn’t “stuff;” it’s more in the air that we breathe and the memories we make in this place. We’re coming up on thirteen years in our home—thirteen years of laughter, tears, and everything in between. You see, there’s a difference between a house and a home. The foundation of our house is brick, the siding is wood, the roof is slate, the porch roof is tin, the interior walls are plaster, the floors are original knotty pine, the windows are leaded glass—all materials that you can buy at any large box store.
But our home is made of different elements. It’s made of memories and laughter, of artwork with meaningful provenance, of framed photographs of the grandkids, of knickknacks and scented candles, and of invitations stuck on the refrigerator with magnets we’ve purchased on our travels.
Of course, at this time of year, the scene changes dramatically. The eight framed pictures of the grandkids are stowed in boxes, replaced by a tiny Christmas village with glowing lights. We find a place for some of my wife’s miniature Christmas trees made of sea glass and topped with a starfish, and another shelf for one of her handmade boxwood trees, painstakingly decorated with baby’s breath and bows made of thin, gold ribbon. Giant nutcrackers and bagpiping Santas appear on table tops. The dining room table is set with Christmas Spode china and glassware, there are red candles in the candelabra on the buffet and in the wrought-iron chandelier we found in a little store down in Virginia many years
Our front yard features a fresh Christmas tree with tiny white lights and ornaments made of oyster shells. Our Navajo crèche lives on a table on the front porch and there are new Christmas pillows on the swing. There are electric candles in the second story windows, pine roping along the fence, a small wreath on the front gate and a larger hand-made wreath on the front door.
I know how fortunate I am, how fortunate we are. I realize that not everyone has a warm, safe place to sleep, or enough food on their table, or even a circle of family and friends with whom to share the holidays. We are blessed beyond reason.
No small wonder I love coming home.
I’ll be right back.
Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His new novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon.
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