At Home – The Understory

Our beloved Cary Gibson couldn’t be with us for November’s Tenx9 event “At Home” and so Rob McRay filled in to provide the understory. This was our night…

Nashville, tonight we were “At Home.”

Home is a place you make your own, sometimes in a new place, with new flowers and pillows, new friends and puppies…and sometimes with puppy poop in unwanted places.

Home is the wonderful world of Mamaw’s place—a place of plastic pink couches, 2-holer outhouses, and homemade security systems on the porch…and, hopefully, a place you could die in your own bed.

Home can be fire halls, or P.O.W. camps, or split-level ranches, or small apartments. But mostly it’s a place that holds our treasures…and the most precious treasures are our memories.

Home is the whole “fam-damily”—and the fam-damily is forever (even if we’re not sure we want it to be), with our demons and our saints (and we don’t always agree on who is who)…but sometimes it’s a place where our prodigals try to return.

Home may not have enough bathrooms—but hopefully it’s a safe place to care for our loved ones, and has a great farmhouse table spread with memories, and a bathroom like the great outdoors…and best of all, it’s our own.

Home has a garden, with a dog with tomato mouth, and mud wars on ballet night…and a dream of one day planting our seeds in a new garden in a new home.

Home is sometimes a place of mildewing clothes, and a bathroom where we have to hold our breath, and relatives doing things we don’t talk about…and you wonder if anyone else will remember where it was—but you will.

Home may be a place where it turns out we don’t know if we fit in, or streets with strange new friends, or a new small fellowship…and maybe home is where we make it.

Home is sometimes a place of black humor, and sadism from someone the rest of the world loves, and thunderstorms, and snapping belts, where we all put on Oscar-winning performances…or maybe it’s a place of imperfection and flaws and, hopefully, a place of happiness…and that’s the way we want it.