Brimstone Lark

A place becomes home without you knowing it. Home means normalcy; normalcy means taking things for granted. Bit by bit appreciation fades into familiarity and, without noticing, you fall in love with a new home.

You have to really appreciate moments of true gratitude because they are so rare. The drumbeat of routine makes it impossible to feel that gratitude all of the time. But it is exactly the routine that day by day turns a place into home.

Home doesn’t exist without the outside world to contrast it with. We leave home to explore. We’re lucky when we find it unchanged, arms still open when we return. We’re lucky when the people that we call home encourage us to go, and help us feel safe enough to step outside, teaching us that they’ll be there when we return.

But everything changes because in no two days are we the same person. Adulthood is, in part, realizing what this means to the idea of home. We have to create homes, cultivate safety. We should experience and share gratitude for what exists today, because it is all temporary. Respect of this transience will soon calcify into a memory of what was when we were children, when we were adolescents, when we were young.

As we befriend this pattern, even the sense of loss we feel can give us hope for green roots.