“There’s No Place Like Home”

It’s a sign of a happy vacation, I think, when you have to seriously reacclimate, on reaching home. We had our heads thoroughly Hawai’i-fied for a week and a half—living in our swimsuits (and my bare feet), accumulating layers of sunscreen on our skin and salt-water in our hair, eating our way across the landscape in seafood and traditional dishes… Our re-entry was not as jarring as it might have been: Despite the snow-photos sent to us by our staff while we were away, we didn’t have to dig out our car when we got back to our airport. (It’s a trick, though, todress for that travel-day—at the start of which we found ourselves sweaty and booking it across a warm-weather outdoor airport to catch our rerouted flight, and at the end of which we got pelted with not-quite-freezing rain from the terminal to our car… Hard to “dress for the weather” with that kind of spread.)

It has taken a bit of doing to get my head back in the game, here at home. We had to hit the ground running, back to work on Monday morning, despite our 2am arrival home (WAY past my bedtime!), and we still had to unpack, and start laundry, and get groceries, and generally get ourselves (and our stuff) settled. I had a lengthy work to-do list—things that needed catching-up—and an even lengthier email from my boss with more things that had come up while we were away, or needed done now that we were back. I was tired all day, and not entirely back to my usual groove. Yesterday, for some reason, I was even more tired—but today I’m feeling again as if I belong where I am.

And despite regret at having to leave the achingly-lovely Big Island, “where I am” is an immensely comfortable place for us to be. We are Blessed with the pleasant house that came with our jobs, and we’ve customized it to ourselves in a myriad of ways. It’s a sign of a happy life, I think, when Home is a place you can look forward to, even in leaving a place like Hawai’i. We adore our own bed, for example. We’ve loaded it up with the softest memory-foam and mattress-toppers you can imagine (I tease Jon that—despite being a tough-guy in nearly everything else—he’s ever-so-slightly “Princess and the Pea” when it comes to mattresses), and the sheets and covers are silky-furry fleece, and we each have the exact right pillow for how we sleep… And of course the bed comes with four purring furring snuggle-bodies!

Our bed is practically perfection, and we’ve never come home from a trip and not appreciated being back to it.

Multiply that feeling times the dozens of things we love about our home, and the dozens of ways we’ve made it just right for us… and it’s clear that being home is its own kind of Blessing. Its own kind of magic. It’s no wonder that the actual magic words, required for transport to Kansas from Oz, were repetitions of the sentiment, “There’s no place like home!”

It’s not just a mantra—it’s a Magic Spell.