Home Place

Last night after all the dishes were done and the food put away (and Jessie- I owe you a million dollars- remind me on payday) we sat down and watched a movie she'd brought with her. It was called Away We Go and starred that fatally cute but completely dorked-out John Krasinski and the ethereally beautiful Maya Rudolph.

If you've never seen the movie, it's about a couple who, finding themselves about to have a baby, decide to travel around and figure out where it is they need to live to make their own home with their child. They are not a typical couple. She is of mixed race, calm and deadly humorous, he is, well, as dorky as a man can be and she loves him for that and for his sweet, sweet soul.
And they travel and visit people they know who live in places they think they might like to live from Montreal to Phoenix and they end up in an old house she grew up in on a lake in Central Florida.
It's a delicious movie for people like me who can live without car crashes and unexpected violence and love good dialogue and the way an actor's face can tell a story in one silent second. There are heartbreaking moments and there are hilarious moments and there are moments that are sweet and there are moments that are ridiculous- sort of like life, you know. It's an actor's movie.
A small movie. One that is just big enough to find a nook in the heart.
And like most movies of this sort, it colors the thoughts for awhile. I know this one did mine.

What really ripped it in a good way for me was the house they ended up in. I had been told by my kids that the hallway in that house looked so much like ours that it was bizarre. And they were right.

And here's the funny thing- the house they used for that movie was in Leesburg, Florida which is not so far from where I grew up and when I saw the exteriors for the house, I knew it was an old grove house. And when I was a child and then a teenager, I always had a yearning to live in one of those old grove houses. They were solid built, not fancy, but looked more like something that had grown out of the orange groves and the oaks than had been built there.

But I moved away from that part of Florida and I moved up here to the north part of the state and I've lived in so many houses here I can't begin to count them all up and I feel like every one of those houses was a stepping stone to where I live now and there, in that movie, was my hallway in that grove house in Leesburg, Florida.

I swear to you- I can't come up with any explanation of how my hallway got into that movie, right down to the little spring bolts you have to step on to unlatch at the bottom of the doors, to the windows beside the doors and the shapes of the glass and then yes, the stairway, which is so very like ours.

I don't know. Maybe they were all built like that a hundred and fifty years ago. Maybe the same guy built the two houses.

But it was strange and a little wonderful to see those two darling people in the movie open their front door and come into the hallway that looked just like mine and to realize they were home. They walked to the end of the hallway and went out the matching double doors, the twins (quadruplets?) to mine and out back and sat down and well, okay, they had a lake where I have a chicken coop and a railroad track, but still.



Home. They were home.

And we re home, here. It's such a beautiful house to live in, this home of mine and when I moved here, I knew I was someplace I'd been looking for a long, long time. It's a house that holds more stories than I will ever know and here we are, my family and me, giving it more stories. A wedding, a wake, babies, countless family get-togethers, music, hurricanes, food grown, chickens raised, tears and anxieties and joys. Quiet sittings on the porch and raucous good-times.

This is my home for now and I am eternally grateful for it and when I watched that movie last night, I was happy for the characters that they had found their home, too.

And that's all. I just wanted to write about my house with its wide pine board floors and it's soaring staircase and its front and back doors with the arched glass windows. There's no stained glass, there is no carpet or heavy mahogany furniture, just comfortable stuff and aprons on the wall and food cooking in the kitchen and chickens laying eggs out back. We eat here, we sleep here, we dream here. The kids come here to celebrate and laugh together.

My dream house, my home. I did grow up and find an old grove house to live in. No grove, but the house is the same. My Florida home. I've planted the palm trees out of a yearning for them and the camellias, too. But the oak trees- oh yes, they were here already.

And when that movie crew packed up and went away, I'll bet that a few of the people, the actors and the crew, wished they could stay on to live in Leesburg in that house by the lake but they couldn't. They had to go home to their own houses.

But me? I watched the movie last night and I went to bed in this house and I woke up here too and I've gathered the eggs and fed the chickens and I'm about to feed the husband and we're here in this house, this home.

And it is good.