The kind of place I want my home to be

The kind of place I want my home to be

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.

Chicago hope

Chicago hope

From her stoop in the center of a sophisticated city, my niece Erin has carved out a delightful little corner of Mayberry. She and her neighborhood gang enjoy a living-room-forts, frontyard-warter-balloon-fight, Saturday-sleepover, come-home-when-the-streetlights-turn-on kind of childhood, while all around them Chicago hums. They each have the necessary kind of scheduled activities that keep their parents [...]