An oasis in the midst of a desert.Home is where I regroup,recover and rejuvenate and so do those I love. It is a place to retreat from the pressures of 'out there' and get ready to go back out. It is a place to invite them in for tea parties,supper,a cup of chowder or a stroll through the garden. It's the place to make presents and give presents. A place to dream and to listen to the dreams of others. It's the place where you can find me. I'm there most of the time because you see I'm the homemaker.

It is a house but so much more. Because a house can be a home but a house doesn't have to be a home. It has to have a feeling of belonging to somebody to be a home. To be more than a place you live in it has to develop into a reflection of a personality. A house is a building. A home is a frame for a life, or in my case, several lives.

Our home is the frame we built around six children and two people who wanted to parent them. It is a place that is always changing. If I am not changing the furniture arrangement then hubby is tearing out a wall or a floor. We will probably never get the place built. The needs and wants of the family are constantly changing. But we have solid log walls and good woodstoves to warm them with as well as a place to put a loaf of bread in the oven and a table to sit down and eat it at too!

The home has changed because the family has changed. We have nearly doubled adding three young men and four children to our original eight. Now there are only four of us here fulltime and one daughter part time. But still it is home to the whole brood occasionally! I joke at those times about needing expanding walls.

Part of our home is the pen of chickens outside,the three or more cats in the yard, the flowers planted in swirls and sweeps leading from the front door out and up the driveway and over to the woods on each side of the house where they blend with God's idea of a garden. The woods enfolds our home. The wild birds sing in the treetops and the frogs and toads come out of the woods to explore our yard and garden. Fruit trees circle the house and make the yard more homey. Some we planted and some the birds planted for us. Our vegetable garden fills the sideyard. Our sugarbush circles our house and makes our home smell like maple sugar in the early spring,bright green in the summer and red and yellow in the fall.

Our home is the place where we sigh in relief after we've been gone awhile. We smile when the kids come home with their kids,husbands,friends and lovers. It's the place where we marked on a board as the kids grew up. "See how tall you are!" we said to them as they grew. There are handprints inscribed on the table and some by the backdoor in the cement and by the front door in that sidewalk too with a ? for the baby not yet born that year.

It's a place where we dreamed our dreams,cried many tears of sorrow and rage,danced in the kitchen kissed the new babies and brides. It's a frame for our lives this past quarter of a century. It's that log cabin hubby always wanted and now he's got it.

Learn more about this author, Candace Williams.
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