Sitting Here With My Sadness

I'm sitting outside on a lounge chair in the backyard of our home in Tennessee. Our home for a few days more. Soon it will be someone else's home. Scattered around me are guacamole and lime tostitos, my therapy of choice today. The birds are lifting up their songs and the breeze is just the slightest bit cold. There are a thousand tasks I need to do, but perhaps this one is the most important- sitting here with my sadness on leaving Tennessee behind again. It's not the house with its busted gutters and never ending yard work. It's not even the stuff inside our home, although there are plenty of antiques and art that remind me of people I love. It's not the stuff with price tags that is in my heart, but instead all the memories that come with this land. 

If I look beyond my outstretched feet, I can see where three little boys used to run around shirtless in the sun before their sisters even came to be. Merit was one when we bought this house. We brought two more babies home to it. This is the longest we've lived anywhere.

That's not all I see. I see friends and their babies filling our yard on playdates before the kids were even old enough to go to school. I see Daddy coming home from work in his scrubs and jumping into the blowup pool the kids were playing in. I see those grins that spread across their faces! I remember rocking my babies outside when they were fussin'. I recall the tree I looked forward to blooming every year that fell down while we were snowed in in Colorado. I see the place where I ran out of my house to talk to my best friend when she told me she had cancer. I see our sweet Holly dog's final resting place. I see the land we retreated to when we were told to "stay home" and I feel all the comfort it gave us when the whole world had gone crazy.

This place isn't a house to me. This place is where we finally moved home after Jordan's service. It's where we decided we wanted to raise our kids around family and friends who love them. It's the community we had when we decided that we could bring a little brown girl from the other side of the world and make her feel welcome because small town people ARE good people and would welcome her, too. 

New life is sprouting up all around me- flowers in the yard, buds in the trees, and nephews even. I don't want to leave. 

Until next time, Sweet Southern Comfort.