Last week I shared a few of my thoughts and feelings on the concept of  “home.”  This week I’d like to expound on that theme a little more.   A couple of my favorite poets have dealt with the topic in some interesting ways. 

 Carl Sandburg wrote that “you can’t come back to a home unless it was a home you went away from.”  That sounds ridiculously obvious, but I think he was trying to say that “home” is not just where you’ve come from.  It may be true for most of us, but for some, their starting place in life has none of the positive elements that we associate with “home.”  If you fall into this category, I hope you continue searching for a real home, if you have not yet found one.  Reach out to people who can provide the love and nurturing you should have gotten where you began.  Better yet, look for ways that you can supply the love and nurturing that will provide a home for someone else who needs it.  You’ll both be winners. 
 T.S. Eliot took a different slant on the concept of  “ home.”  He wrote,
“Home is where one starts from . .  . and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time . . . .”  I’m not entirely sure, but I think he is saying that once we have been away from home and seen what lies beyond our borders, we return home with a renewed appreciation of what we had there all along.  We learn to see what home has to offer that we would never have seen, had we not ventured away from it -- things, and perhaps people, that we took for granted.
 One thing I think many of us fear is that when our children grow up and move away, they will find other places more appealing and not want to come back home often.  Or perhaps that their memories of their childhood home are not as happy as we would hope for them to be.  I don’t know who it was, but someone once wrote that “it takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home.”  That makes me wonder if we did enough good “livin’ in our house t’ make it home” for my daughters when they were growing up.  Specifically, did I do everything I could and should have done in that house to really make it “home” for them, in the sense that they feel warm and secure inside when they remember those years?  And that they will always want to come back when they get the chance? 
 Of course, our home was not without its flaws.  Neither was yours.  But, fortunately a home doesn’t have to be perfect to be a pretty great place.  It just has to be the place where your heart safely rests, no matter where the rest of you may wander.  If it’s really “home,” it will never just be the place you hang your hat.
 Thanks for giving me a moment of your time.