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Saturday, January 26, 2008

A house is not a home....

Sometimes, in time of distress, you forget about the good, and only see the bad.

Yesterday, my oldest daughter started crying again because we are moving. She just brought it up on her own. Came over to me, told me she didn't want to move, and started crying. I feel so badly for her. Unfortunately, I know that she will have to move a few more times in her life. Such is the life that her father and I chose for her being a military child. She was very upset.

I started to console her, told her that we were taking everything that made this house our home with us. I explained that a house is just a building. It is walls, carpet, and a roof, but it is not a home. It isn't a home until someone moves in, and makes it a home. Home will always be where ever we are together, and of course, I had to use the line that home is where her heart is. She got it, and it did make her feel better, but it really made me start thinking about our home right now.

Right now, it is putting me through so much stress. With all the problems it has had, and the owner trying to force us to move out early, totally interrupting our plans, it makes me feel like this place is nothing but trouble. It also makes me think of the first house my daughter lived in. It was much smaller than this one. When we lived in it, I remember thinking that it had so many issues. Sometimes, I would talk a lot of trash about that little place. Now that I remember back though, it really served us well. We made it a great little home for the time that we had it, and I have a lot of fond memories of it. Now, thinking back, I recall that it wasn't the house that was the problem, it was the maintenance staff that took care of the housing development that we lived in. I remember their incompetence. I remember their not being able to complete a job well or timely, but that was them, and not so much the house. I also remember that I could look out my back windows and see the gulf of Mexico. I remember that little bougainvillea that was growing up the side of the house. I remember the mole that started to live there beside our walkway just before we moved. We tell my daughter now that was her first pet. = ) Yes, that house served us very well.


Now, I am still very stressed out here, and all I see are the problems and issues, but I expect that I will look back some years from now and remember that this house served us very well. Of course, by then, this will just be another building, and we will have moved on to make somewhere else, maybe even two somewhere elses, a home.

My poor daughter will undoubtedly get upset again about the whole move, but she is really very lucky. She has something that many people are never lucky enough to have; a real home. A house can fall down. It can burn to the ground. It is just a fallible building. A home, though, is something that you carry with you. It is an emotional state that a family makes no matter where they are. A home is much more valuable than a house, and she has what I think is a priceless one.

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