Home


 While looking through a few of my Mom's photos this morning - she took thousands of photos over the years - I came across Mom's early version of a panoramic photo, most likely taken with an old-fashioned Brownie camera. Two photos taken in as close to symmetry as humanly possible, while  holding a Brownie camera, then carefully cropped and taped together to create one scene - and this scene takes away my breath.
Just for clarity, I am the one in the stroller, so my personal memory of this moment in time is fairly non-existent. Still, this scene takes away my breath, both for the scene which is captured and the people who are there. 
In the foreground is my Grandma Triefenbach, who died when I was three, and Grandpa Triefenbach, who then lived with us for many years. My Dad, who is carrying all of the cane fishing poles, recently passed, and my cousin, Jack, with whom I became friends before his family moved away. In the background, Uncle Elbert, my Mom's brother and Jack's Dad, passed suddenly in the mid-1960's, and Aunt Marie, his wife, who later remarried, which is when Jack then moved away. My older brothers, Larry and Carl, stood between Uncle Elbert and Aunt Marie.
Allowing your eyes to linger on the panorama, one gets a sense of the size of garden Mom and Dad kept to feed us through the year. I can still smell the onions and tomatoes as they matured in that place, and can feel the softness of the earth where potatoes were planted and corn took its stand. The grape arbor near the sprawling catalpa tree gave shade to multitudes of ever-present farm cats, while providing us with grape juice, jelly - and more than a bottle or two of wine over the years. The lilac bush in front of our home was just outside the kitchen door, allowing the southerly breeze to fill our home with the Springtime fragrance of absolute delight and beauty.
Still, the thing which blows me away in surprise is the understanding that, for Mom to take these pictures, she had to be standing in the open barn door of the hayloft in our barn. Mom never liked going up the steps to access the hayloft, but in order to take these pictures, must have made a necessary exception. I am so grateful she did, for in capturing this moment in time on film, Mom also forever saved an image of my childhood home, where so many memories were made and life for me took on its earliest meanings.
My brother and his wife, Larry and Martha, reside there today, but it will forever be etched in my mind and heart just as it appears in this picture - home. My home.
Some have said, "Home is where the heart is", and that is true to a point yet, for this heart, home is so much more. Home is in our DNA, through the shared genetics of connected tissue, value, sacred meaning and holy spaces. Home certainly includes the heart, yet encompasses all the soul could imagine, on earth as in heaven. Home - is a foretaste of that day when, by the Mercy and Grace of God, we enter the that time and place of the Home of God's own Heart, where all God's children have a place at the Table, a surname of 'child of God', and a future rested, not in land or buildings or gardens, but in the eternal nature of God's own Being. Home.
I truly doubt Mom was considering such thoughts of home as she took these pictures, then delicately brought them together, still I cannot ignore the possibility that she, in some small way, did - for am I not a child of my Mother's womb? Do I not carry her DNA in my own humanity? Could not the ponderings I have today have started with her standing in the doorway of the hayloft, scanning the scene before her for the perfect images to be saved?
It would, indeed, be the highest of compliments to be called, 'A chip off the old block', when it comes to my Mom and her photography, for it would only affirm from others what I already know in my soul . . . Home is the stuff of which we are made, not just the places we are. Of Mom and Dad - and God - I am made - and their wisdom, vision and tenacity for life and faith drive me still. There are few greater gifts on earth than home, I think, and looking once more upon this rediscovered treasure my heart knows it to be true. 
I pray it is so for you, as well.
Something to ponder on the journey.

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