The kind of place I want my home to be

A brand new Powerhouse SS sits in the park across the street and provides the perfect metaphor for the kind of place I want my home to be now that my active years of parenting are winding down.

I want to be a charging station, a place where the risk-takers and dreamers I’ve raised can come to fill up when their admirable efforts to forge their way in this old world drain them.

I’ll fight the urge to tether them here and I’ll even offer a fast charging option, though I’d prefer a nice, slow power up based on pure love and belly laughs. We’ll sit around a table thick with memories, push aside Grandma’s well-used dinner plates, and talk the way we did when they were young and squeaky voiced, but still so very sincere.

I want my home to be the kind of come-as-you-are place where the doors stay open in any season – literally in the summer, figuratively in the winter (though I once drove down Drew street on an especially cold afternoon and spotted my front door wide open, gusts of snow blowing in.)

I know I’ll have my moments, when wistfulness creeps in and obscures my cheerful vision like frost on a window pane, and I’ll long for the days when I could stand on my front porch and watch my children walk home from their busy days.

By the end of the month, we’ll have a son on one coast and a daughter on the other, with a second son in between. They’ll live too far for impromptu barbecues, but exactly where they need to be right now. I know this and I marvel at their choices way more often than I regret the distance those choices take them from me.

We all look forward to our get-togethers, on their turf or ours, and the efforts everyone makes to see each other make our time together even more special.

Meanwhile, I intend to be the proud joist of their childhood home, wrapped in garland for the holidays, but here and listening on quiet summer mornings too.