Home. Sweet, Sweet Home

Ah. We are home. Actually we arrived home yesterday at 2:30 a.m., but we were so wiped out that we spent the rest of the day doing only the essentials (which, because I’m neurotic, included fully unpacking, doing the laundry, grocery shopping and making bread. What can I say? I hate to face a week unprepared.)

It was a very crazy week-long visit. There was my grandfather’s funeral, which was difficult, and then there was his house to try and make sense of, which was full of stuff but empty of the person who made sense of all that stuff. When my grandma died five years ago he refused to let anyone touch anything from then on. She was the one who organized and labelled and got rid of things or kept them carefully tucked away, and without her the house basically just accumulated. At the back of their closet we found the purse she was using when she died, fully packed and ready to go, down to her little pot of Carmex that went with her everywhere. I think that was the hardest moment, to realize that even after all these years she’s not coming back, and he’s not coming back, and all these things they treasured pass to their children and grandchildren who will treasure them less simply because they don’t hold the meaning for us that they did for them. It’s such a shame, and it seems so sad. I wish I could go back and make myself a better granddaughter, make myself ask for more stories and listen to them harder, commit them to memory, so that I’ll understand the importance of that knot my grandfather’s father tied out of wood when he was just falling in love with his future wife and which they found thirty years later and passed on to their children, but it’s just a story for me, a neat story, but not one that is mine. It’s someone else’s story. The stories of my life were my grandparents’ stories too, because they loved me so much and my life was so important to them. But their stories are shrouded in the past, inaccessible to me, not because they wouldn’t have told them but because I never thought to ask. I know it’s part of the passage of time, that children never realize these things until it’s too late, but I still wish I hadn’t been so selfish, so wrapped up in my own life. I wish I had known them better.

Still, it was nice to hear stories at my grandfather’s funeral that I’d never heard before, like the story from when he was in boot camp. All of 5’6″ and 120 lbs soaking wet, he was completing the final seven-mile march on the last day with his 50 lb pack when he noticed, around the fifth mile, a fellow soldier collapse and take his boots off. The other soldier’s feet were bleeding profusely and he shook his head and told my grandfather, “I can’t do it. I can’t go on.” My grandfather helped him wrap his feet up, made him put his boots back on, took the other man’s pack and fastened it to his own pack, and walked the final two miles with two fifty-pound packs on his back and an injured friend leaning on him. There was a certain drill sergeant who my grandfather called “the Indian” (because he was an Indian, my grandfather helpfully explained) who was nearly seven feet tall (according to my grandfather) and who scared the daylights out of every soldier in that boot camp. My grandfather said that all through basic training the Indian drill sergeant “kept his eye on me…never said anything to me, just watched me, all the time.” When my grandfather came to the end of that march with two packs that weighed nearly as much as he did and another man leaning on him, my grandfather said the drill sergeant walked over to him and picked him up so they were eye-to-eye and said, “Soldier, what are you made of?!”

I believe it. My grandfather was made of stronger stuff than most people. My dad and my aunt made the wonderful decision to bury him in the blue plaid shirt, khaki pants and suspenders that he spent most of the latter years of his life in, complete with his tobacco and rolling papers in his shirt pocket. I’m sure he wouldn’t have liked to find himself without them, either in this life or the next. I was shocked and grateful when I found that the army sent two soldiers to attend the burial. One played a gorgeous rendition of “Taps”, then they folded the flag that was laid on my grandfather’s coffin and presented it to my aunt. My grandfather was only a soldier for a few years, and he was sent to Germany just after World War II ended so he never saw active combat, but the army didn’t overlook his service in the end. Just one  more thing to love about our military.

The rest of the week was just as crazy. We have a new niece and nephew whom we got to meet for the first time,

Exhibit A, the world’s cutest four-month-old

 lots of other nieces and nephews to smother in kisses (me) and roughhouse with (the Ogre).

Exhibit B, the aunt whom all the children run from for this exact reason

We got to see my communist of a little brother and his charming wife, who live in Austin (where all the communists in Texas live) and who we hardly ever get to see.

This is what a communist looks like on his wedding day

We also saw my youngest brother, who just finished his sophomore year at A&M;, and who graciously gave up his room so his nephew would have a quiet place for his crib.

He loves it when we come visit

And we had the luck to be in Dallas at the same time as some old college friends who we haven’t seen in years (literally years), even though we keep in touch via our blogs (here’s Janet’s!). We got to spend a way too brief amount of time with them, but still it was nice to see them and their kids.

All in all, though, the kids (and their parents) were totally exhausted by the time we had to fly home. The two flights and two hours of driving to get back to Ave Maria were grueling as usual, but we made it home.

I missed our home so. I missed our neighborhood. I missed our neighbors. I missed my Sodastream, which my mother bought me for my birthday because she’s the best mom ever. I missed our bed. I missed how green Florida is. I literally missed everything about our home, and spent the last two days we were in Texas saying to the Ogre, “I just want to go home. I miss Ave Maria.”

I never said that about Vegas. It was never home the way this weird little Catholicville in a swamp is. It’s strange to feel my roots shifting. I’ve never loved Dallas particularly, but it’s always been home. I know it will always be home for me in the same way the Bay Area is home for the Ogre. They are the homes of our childhood. But Ave Maria really has become a new kind of home for our family, and I am so, so happy to be back here.