~home is where ever your heart is~


Six years ago today back in the mountains of southwestern Colorado, I was that girl.

It was six weeks before Mike and I were going to be married.  I was in Montrose for a short stay and while I was there I wanted to plant some Russian Mammoth sunflower seeds.  A gazillion of them went into the ground that April afternoon.  Less than a dozen of them arose from the rocky and clay soil.  At the time, I didn't realize that sunflowers were not the only things that might have trouble adjusting to life in a new land.

I moved there to Colorado in late May of 2013, only a few days after we were married back home in Hutchinson, Kansas.  It didn't take long for me to get to homesick for the only life I had ever known.  It took the greatest share of that first summer to feel like I was going to ever make it.  Slowly I got used to things, but not before I must have uttered the phrase....

"I miss Kansas and I just want to go home!"
perhaps a couple of hundred times.

 A very wise friend from back in Hutchinson emailed me one day in mid-June after sensing just how distraught I was about living over 600 miles away in a place that seemed like a foreign country to me at the time.  She reminded me that I needed to start remembering that home can be plenty of different places and that a person doesn't have to give them all up.  That wise woman who had been through plenty of heartache of her own in life, closed her email with a message that I didn't forget.  It was one that helped me to turn my way of thinking around.
"Peggy, you always need to remember that home is where ever you are with Mike."
And she was quite right.
It was then and it still is now.

 We never know where life will take us and perhaps that is a good thing for it is the not knowing that helps us to realize just how much we need one another.  Over the years I have learned that lesson quite well, painfully so at times.  The last few weeks have been kind of stressful but there is light at the end of that proverbial tunnel.  Soon school will be out and I will join Mike here in a wonderful place called Newkirk.  I pray that God will always send me that gentle reminder of how good my life really is and how fortunate I am to go through the days that lie ahead with a man like Mike.  

 Life is good and home is truly where your heart is.

The robin's egg blue Colorado sky as seen through the treetop of the old cottonwood that was in our front yard in Montrose.  



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