Coming Home

I stumbled, cross eyed out of the bedroom to find Chad and his brother Doug sitting at the kitchen table brewing a cup of tea. It might have been 8 o’clock but it was Christmas week and it’s hard enough on a regular night with little ones to identify the time after supper and bedtime. I shook the fog from my brain and made a comment about being old and tired.

Hot cup of tea steaming in my hand I began to come alive again as we started to tell stories. How I love having Doug sitting around our kitchen table; how each of us hate sharing him with the West.

The kids have left a mound of play doh on the table, and speckles of it splattered all over our floor. The smell quickly brings me back as it does every time, to a memory of Christmas, probably 30 years ago with new playdoh, a play doh spaghetti machine of sorts, the Statler Brothers are playing in the background and there is company in the house. I can nearly see the Christmas tree and the panelled walls in my minds eye and can almost feel the carpet under my knees.

” You know, sometimes I wonder how much my brain actually has stored all those childhood memories.” I mutter. There are a few here and there, and pictures certainly help, but there is so much missing. I wonder how much the kids will remember of their childhood?  Thankfully we take so many pictures, maybe too many pictures. Their brains will be stuffed full and they will be begging for a break from all the memory.”  I chuckle.

“I don’t know,” Doug replies, if you think of how a certain smell, or sound can bring you back somewhere you haven’t been or thought of in ages, I think it’s all in there for sure.  Sometimes it just takes a little digging around to bring it to the front again.”

So we dig. Doug and Chad dig around like only siblings can and my brain starts churning.

What if memory is our ticket home? I don’t mean home as in the physical space, although maybe this too is true, but to a centred, peaceful place.  A place of knowing.  Maybe in all the business, maybe sometimes even in all the fighting to forget, that is where we really lose ourselves, where we lose what we need to be at home in our own skin, ok with ourselves, where we’ve come from, who we are becoming.

This isn’t about drumming up old demons or refusing to forgive, but going home to the good, bad, hilarious and heartbreaking.  Isn’t home a mixture of all of this? and maybe isn’t this even where the richness comes from?  As I imagined my close friends and family it is their rich tapestry of experience that has made them the beautiful people they are, is it the same for me? It’s when we get stuck on one category of memory that our road home can detour, swerve and even kill us.

So this year, 2017, I want it to be a year of coming home.  I want to spend more time with my loved ones, hearing and remembering. Being courageous enough to move beyond the pleasantries and listen. This is what makes our relationships rich, and this place of knowing is true and centred and right. I think when we give all of it to God it is healing and when we share bits of it we are more ourselves with those we love.  Be courageous. Come home.