A Good Good Friday

from Jacqueline

When I was about eleven years old, our English teacher assigned a composition (that’s what they used to call “creative writing”) in which we were to describe our home. I couldn’t wait to get started because I had loved essay writing from the time I knew how to pick up a pen and write something. I went straight to my room after we’d had dinner that evening, and set to my composition, and the words flowed onto the page with ease.

I explained, in my essay, that by the time I arrived home from school, my brother had been home for a few minutes, and was likely to be rushing out again to play with his friends. My first task, therefore, was to catch him by the collar and remind him to change out of his school uniform because money doesn’t grow on trees. My second job was to fill the coal scuttle and open the dampers on the solid-fuel stove, so that we’d have hot water and heat for the evening. I described how I felt when six- thirty rolled around and the bus dropped my mother at the end of the road, and how I’d already have the kettle on because I knew she’d be gasping for a cup of tea. She’d go into the garden and call out for my brother to come home, and pick a few weeds from the flower beds to get the working day out of her skin.   As we set about preparing dinner, Dad would arrive home with winter coldness wrapped around him - I always remember the winters - and Mum would open the stove’s fire door so that he could hold his hands to the blaze and begin to thaw. That was home, that stove, that warmth on a cold evening, the family together, sitting in the kitchen to talk about the day. I deliberately noted, in this composition, that a house was just bricks and mortar. It was the people in the house that made it a home. A week later, in class, I discovered I was the only person who had written about home. Everyone else wrote about the color of their bathroom, or the wallpaper in the bedroom.

I was thinking about that essay during the flights that brought me from Toronto back home after my marathon book tour. I was thinking about home, what home means to me today, and how much I missed home. But the truth is that like most of us, I have more than one “home.”

There’s the home I inhabit with my husband, our dog, our cat. My brother and his wife live around the corner, and there are the neighbors I see each day, and the “dressage divas” who I hang out with at the barn where we all keep our horses. This is the home where I walk around the garden in the evenings and dead-head the roses, or sit back in a wicker chair and talk with my husband as the sun goes down.

The other home is in northern California, a place I visited some twenty-five years ago and knew – just knew – that I would one day be back to live there, because it was my destiny. And I did, and it was. It broke my heart to move away, but I am fortunate now to have a home in that place, and every minute I spend there is precious, because there’s something there that touches my spirit and I am at peace. I’ve a lot of dear friends in the neighborhood, perennial friends, people who have been in my heart for years and who I will keep close for years to come. That’s home, that place in the heart.

And now it’s Eastertime. I love that word, Eastertime. It sounds so much closer than just “Easter.” It’s my favorite holiday, a much-loved time of year and, more especially, a time that reminds me of home, that first home, the place where I was born and grew up. Easter is early this year, and Europe is experiencing a bitter cold, but my memories of this time of year are filled with walks in woods carpeted with primroses, bluebells and wood anemones. Easter to me is all about new life, about renewal, about shedding winter’s grayness for the promise of warmth and color. It’s about what is to come and what we have to look forward to. It’s nature at its most optimistic, and it’s challenging us to come along for the ride.

Have a lovely Eastertime, and many blessings to you and yours.

(PS: I was going to treat you to a photo of lovely toasted hot cross buns, and another of an English woodland carpeted with primroses, but the blogger is playing up this morning, and I can't upload the images. Oh, well, another Eastertime, perhaps.