08/24/2025
Take the time to read this you’ll be glad you did. It was the first column I ever wrote for a newspaper.
Returning to comforts of home simply a state of mind
It's a feeling that never goes away - one we never outgrow and never forget. It shines gently like a candle in the pages of our minds. That feeling is home.
At night across the prairie, darkness fell and the wind swept down from the north. The wild things with their shiny eyes came to the edge of town. It was then that our house seemed like an island of light and love in a sea of darkness. At such an hour, the word home must have come into being - dreamed up by some creature that never knew a home. In his yearning, there must have come to mind the vision of a mother's face and a father's deep voice along with the smell of fresh-baked bread, sunshine in the window and the muted sound of rain on a roof.
There exists inside me an image of a child of 7. He is nestled safe and warm under a down-filled quilt listening to the sounds of his world coming to
' life. The window to his room is open, and the air is chilled and filled with the fragrance of the night's summer rain. His eyes peer over the top of his quilt, and he watches in earnest. His room is brought to life by the light of the morning sun as it creeps slowly inside his world. Alone, he listens to the foot steps of his sister as she passes outside his door and walks slowly down the wooden steps to the kitchen. He cuddles deeper into his bed and listens once again.
The sounds of the kitchen are like music to his ears. The clattering of pots and pans and the deep baritone voice of his father reminds him that food is being prepared. Hunger rouses, him from his bed. His warm feet touching the cold wooden floor awaken his senses even more.
He gathers his thoughts along with his clothes and scrambles down the stairs. Bursting into the kitchen, he is meet with warm smiles and a feeling that this is home.
Nearly every breath he has taken in his childhood still lingers somewhere in that house. There are memories so firmly imbedded in his mind that he will never forget them. I feel grateful that these memories belong to me. They have nourished me through trials and tribulations.
In the past, I saw home as where my family dwelled. I saw home as the place that con tained my childhood, what I could remember and all I had forgotten.
A house is more than walls and floors, ceilings and a roof. It's all the words that were spo ken there, all the cries and whispers, all the good times and the bad. Home is the feel ing of spirit and the knowing of your soul.
In my travels through life, I have journeyed down many roads searching and abiding in houses built of brick and wood, houses that were big and small, and some that were cold and empty.
It wasn't until my last trip back home to Freeman, S.D., that I finally realized what I had been looking for has never really left me. When I stood in front of the old house, it seemed smaller than I remembered - mainly because I have grown and, in my mind, so too have my memories. In the backyard, a shallow hollow is all that is left of the tree that once held our tire swing. Cobwebs and dust have laid claim to our old weathered house that sits emp ty now. The ghostly laughter of children playing are all that remain of the family that once called it home.
It has to be this way for the natural reason that times
In my life, there have existed times when I have become alienated to the world and the people in it. It is then that I call on my memory of this home and the spirit and the knowing of my soul to take me back once again.
There, the stresses of today's world disappear and I feel shel tered again. Family surrounds me there. Mother, father, sister, brother, we are whole again. The table is set and we gather together. Grace is said, and laughter is heard once again in my life.
Today, in memory, I stand before that old gray house not as a child but as a man. It is that man who has come to real ize that I can go home again in a much deeper way than I ever believed possible.
