Coming Home

(In the packing and the leaving, the traveling and the arriving, the family wedding and the birthday, and the connecting and the settling, I have been too long from this space.  So long, in fact, that blogger changed the editing interface and I had to relearn how to post!  Oh, the stories I have to tell...)

It is called a common dayflower (Commelina) because its bloom lasts that long.
  






Only a day.


But that day is long enough to give me hope and welcome me back home after 28 years of wandering.  It is a curious thing to return to a place that is home, and yet is so unfamiliar. A few weeks ago, I looked up from the unpacking to browse my pictures and realized they were all Pennsylvania skies and fields.






 


They made me "homesick".

Twenty-eight years is a long time.  The dream of return, the dream that seemed as far away as the place of dreaming, has become a reality. The lush green and frozen white of Pennsylvania and New York have been replaced by the drought dust and brutal heat of a Texas summer.








But the friends we made in those years of exile, the friends who loved us, welcomed us as family when ours was so far away, and laughed and cried with us, still dwell in our hearts.

And always will.

They are Tolkien's "gold that does not glitter", the intentional wanderers, "the old that is strong (and) does not wither", the "deep roots. . .not reached by the frost."


They are as beautiful as the flower that blooms in the dust,






and as warm as a Texas sunset.