BEING AT HOME [M, 5-31-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

BEING AT HOME    [M, 5-31-21]

 

I guess that is why I was attracted to folk music. It’s about a poor, wayfaring stranger, who is 500 miles from home, in the early morning rain, who can’t help but wonder where he’s bound. Yep, that’s me. Folk music, like country, is about getting back home.

I never felt comfortable if I were away from home for very long.

I don’t mean the physical place of home, although that is more important all the time as we get older, because it’s just easier to be in the same place all the time, where you know all the obstacles from getting from the sofa to the coffee pot and back again. But throughout my life, I have known that my people were my home. I can be away from Piccadilly Street however long it’s necessary if Helen is with me.

I recently realized that I have no good memories of the farm on which I grew up. We moved there from Indianapolis when I was ten. I was a city boy suddenly out place. For me, the farm was a lonely forced labor camp. We had no plumbing, so there was an outhouse. Water for everything had to be pumped and then carried in, and carried out again. There was kindling to chop and coal to carry in and ashes to carry out, cows to milk, animals to feed, eggs to gather, hay to “make,” miles of garden rows to weed, under an unrelenting sun, with chiggers gnawing at your ankles. We had no car, so going anyplace required miles of walking on dirt and gravel roads or in the weedy ditches of narrow highways.

I am always nostalgic about those years. I have so many good memories from that period of my life. But they aren’t of the farm itself. My good memories are of church and school and friends and extended family. So many. It was rather startling to realize none of them are about the farm itself. I’ve never understood people who choose to dig in the dirt in the sun when they have the option of sitting in the shade with a book.

I have always enjoyed travel, and gatherings of congenial people. I loved going to continuing education events. There was a time when I traveled a lot to speak at church and clergy and cancer events. I loved the first day or two. I felt renewed in energy and spirit by being with those good folks. Then, though, I would start missing home. If I could do it without rudeness or causing trouble for someone, I would leave early, to go home—to my children, my grandchildren, to Helen.

Now the children and grandchildren have their own homes, their own people who make them feel at home. What I have remaining for home is what I have had for home for 62 years--Helen. Today, at 2 pm,  we start our 63^rd year.

I feel very much at home.

John Robert McFarland