Back to Home, Sweet Home!

Has it really been a year!?!  Amazing.  Unbelievable.  We just lived it, and we still can't believe it.

Our son, Jamie, and his family met us at DFW to give us back our car.  We had thought to leave it with them for four weeks, and they've had to babysit it for over a year.  Family is so good to us!

Now for the two hour drive HOME to East Texas.  And, yes, that picture of the log home at the top of the blog is our HOME!  We had a log home builder do the structure, but we (the whole family) did all of the finish-out.  For those of you on a mobile device, here's that picture again.

Texas has had record extreme heat this year and is in a severe drought.  We've reminisced about life before central air conditioning - or even window-unit air conditioning!  We both remembered high school in Texas un-airconditioned.  It was so hot your forearm would sweat and stick to the notebook paper.  Final exams in May with not a single breeze coming through the windows was certainly no picnic.  There was no air conditioning in cars either - which is why our parents chose to leave on a trip at 10 o'clock at night instead of driving across Texas in the heat of the day!   Bedtime.  Oh, the misery of trying to go to sleep in the heat.  I wonder how many of us remember to add the blessing of air conditioning to our daily prayers?  Now, with everywhere you go air conditioned, it could be deadly to do without it.  Our bodies are no longer accustomed to the heat.

With those memories in mind we located the house at the top of the hill and next to our forest in order to get a breeze from the shade of those blessed trees.  (Our neighbor laughs at us when we call it "the forest."  He says it's a stand of trees.)  We also added a few windows to the basic house plan - from nine to nineteen and two sets of atrium doors next to "the forest" -  and placed the windows and doors so that, if the electricity or a/c went out, we would be able to get a cross-breeze by opening doors and windows. 

Extreme heat couldn't harm our homecoming.  The grandkids had painted a HUGE sign saying, "Welcome Home," and everyone was there to greet us.  I felt like kissing the people and hugging the trees.  This time our dog, Junior, forgave us for leaving him behind and was immediately happy to see us.  The nine cats always hide when there are multitudes of people around so it was a day or two before we were able to love on them.  Our care-taker-son's dogs even seemed happy to have us home.  Their new goats were there to say hello, too.  The horses and Mordacai, the donkey, were sort of ho-hum about it all.  And have you ever tried to hug a chicken?  Yeah.  First you have to catch one.

But we are HOME!

We have no idea if we'll be here for two days, two weeks, or two months before there is another assignment.  John likens it to Boris and Doris in that movie, "True Lies."  The phone rings and off we go on another adventure.  But for now, we're home.  I shall feast my eyes on hearth and home and family.  Thank you, Lord!