who said you can never go home again

For a long time after Mom passed, it was excruciating to come back to her house. I don't really know how to explain it but I felt like I was trespassing. Even though it was the house I grew up in and Dad's home. In my eyes and heart, it was my mother's house... it was her home. Who was I to go through her things? To discard things she held dear?

I don't think everyone feels like this when they lose a parent, maybe they do, I don't know. And I don't ask anyone to understand it. I'm just telling you how it felt.

Finally, in the fall of last year, it started to feel like home again.

I spent a lot of time last summer seeing to Dad, making sure he had good meals, that things got done around the house.

I think that was when I started to ease back into it all. I came out of the grief induced fog.

Some days I felt like a lion tamer who goes into a cage of Bengal tigers for the first time... Now the only wild creatures in the house are the dogs.

The apple trees that blossomed every spring of my childhood have long been cut down, and somehow the backyard looks smaller to me now.

My perspective has changed.

I expect it's all a part of renewal, of new beginnings, of healing.

"What we see depends mainly on what we look for."
-- John Lubbock

we shall see...