Home Sweet Home!

This morning at 5:30 a.m. I headed to the airport in Chicago.
I arrived in LA about 9:30, and took the shuttle to our car.
I was turning onto our street when I was thunderstruck by this thought, "I'm home!"  It had that wonderful, familiar feeling of turning onto "your" street, the "home stretch", "home sweet home" feeling.  For some of you this may seem like nonsense, or a given; "what is she going on about?" you might be thinking.  However, this is incredibly significant for me.  For someone who has been traveling and moving since before she was born, and has lived in five different countries, is Irish, Canadian, Pakistani, American, and a little Ecuadorian, this is no small thing.  Isabel Allende has written a wonderful book entitled "My Invented Country" and she articulates and describes what I have lived with insight and nostalgia.  This book is available in Spanish or English as she is from Chile, and writes in both languages.
So, I am home! What does that mean?  Well, it's the sigh
in your soul that says, "whew, I'm here!"  "It's swinging the front door open and smelling familiar, us--that vague hard
to define smell that is distinct in each and every home.  Hard to recapture, or put your finger (or nose)

 on exactly what you are smelling.  It's just a delightful cocktail of familiar smells that takes on a life of its own in "your home." You could blindfold me and I could walk into many a home and tell by the smell in whose house I was!  What about you?  What do you feel when you get home?  What do you see?  Hear?  What is the first thing you do?

Before I have the door open, I hear dear, sweet Anastasia our kitty cat that we inherited with this house that has become a home!  Anastasia did so much in the early days to help that be so.  She is a loving, adorable rescue kitty. 
I scoop her up, there is no one else to welcome me as Phil is still traveling, and the kids are all grown up and gone, living in their own houses.  I am so so thankful for Ana's companionship.  I have always loved animals deeply, but loving cats is fairly new for me.  Until Thanksgiving of 2004 I had never really even had much to do with cats.  On a solitude retreat down at Isla Del Sol in Same, Ecuador, I had a kitty attach himself to me and become my shadow.  The kids and Phil joined me after a few days and they got such a kick out of their mom who didn't really care for cats with this devoted cat in tow, with my heart was smitten.  So that year the girls surprised me Christmas morning with my very own kitten!  G. M. O'Malley.  (General Motors, GM for short because she purred so loudly)

Christmas surprise! O'malley greatest kitten ever!

G.M. O'malley!

Anastasia!

 And I have been a cat lover since.  My O'malley had succumbed to a horrible bacterial infection and died in my arms in Ecuador the year before we left and I had not had a cat since.  In 2010 we came up to the States, I started Talbot School of Theology, working on my masters, and Phil was going back and forth between Ecuador and the States, recruiting for Living and Learning, the Semester Abroad program he has birthed and directed over the last number of years.  I just had resigned myself to not having a pet for some time.  However in this miracle house that God provided for us through friends of friends there was a cat that no one wanted, and they weren't sure what they were going to do.  Thank you Lord!  Above and beyond what I had asked or imagined!  So, for me now, coming home 

also means seeing Anastasia again.  Corny?  Well, if you think that you just don't own a cat!  :) or a pet probably!
So, I have unpacked, put everything away, done a few projects that I left half done, and all with Ana's supervision.  I have enjoyed one cup of tea as I did all this, and now I will go make another, and go sit in this wonderful gazebo, and Ana and I will enjoy some California sunshine!  Everything seems so green after a few days in Chicago.  I had forgotten the unique beauty that winter brings in colder parts, bleak? Well, maybe, but it is a beautiful bleakness all of its own.  I loved it.  And I love green too.  So, I am counting eucharisteos this afternoon, some of which I have overlooked, or not seen before, or am seeing with fresh eyes. 
Have you done that lately?  Why not make some tea and do that now?