HOME IS THE NICEST WORD

"Home is the nicest word there is."  Laura Ingalls Wilder

This is our last beach trip of the season.  Just a few days at the North Carolina coast enjoying a small bit of sun and much rain and wind.  The flags have been red most days, High Hazard for swimmers.  And with the Delta variant now spreading among the unvaccinated, of whom there are many in Eastern North Carolina, we're being careful.  Eating outdoors again and masking indoors.  Most people here aren't.  Still, we're loving our time. This is home, too. 

Pine Knoll Shores, North Carolina

Yesterday we woke to a window leak and water splashing--indoors!  It reminded me that as a child in St. Louis I loved to sleep with my head facing the open sash at the foot of the bed, rain in my face or just cracked with very cold winter air. 

What is your memory of home?  To me childhood means spacious old rooms, crumbling plaster, back stairs, piles of laundry and dog hair wafting. We had a coal furnace, a window air-conditioner and year-round, scratchy music on the turntable.  Always living within our means, never too hectic, never wanting more or being dissatisfied. What a luxury.  Four people all invested in eachother.  And Sheba, an amazingly-shedding mongrel dog. 

We've been nesting here at the beach because of the rain.  Mr. Wiggles hates his walks when it's raining, of course, but loves to nest too.  August brings the last days to savor the season we wait for all year.  Summer can almost never live up to our expectations, can it?  I didn't see my grandchildren quite as much as I'd hoped and have more home chores than I want (things fall apart; it's a motif). More seriously, I didn't quite comprehend how ferociously the unvaccinated could keep the pandemic alive.

But on the whole we'll make the most of August.  And prepare to spend the Fall again in another home--a three-room furnished apartment in Princeton, NJ, with busy sidewalks out the windows, laundry in the basement and a fire escape out back ("Home, Not So Simple," Mar 12, 2018). There, like everywhere, we'll nestle into whatever preserves us: the things we love; maybe our past and our memories; surely our hopes.

Alice Walker