This morning as I woke up in my bed in the apartment we are currently calling home, a black lab slyly licking my left foot that was poking out of the sheets and a small black cat purring happily on my chest, the word “home” would not stop rolling around my head.

Home is the three and a half acres and the small yellow house on Whidbey Island, Washington in which I grew up and where my mom still resides.

Home is Phoenix, Arizona in my twenties – bus passes, dance clubs, a string of apartments, college and finding the man who has been my husband now for over twelve years.

Home is the small town where we lived when our children were born, secluded, slow-paced, shadowed by trees and lined by the Puget Sound.  Salt water air.

Home is this small, vertical apartment in the heart of Phoenix in which we now find ourselves.  For Husband and I it is very much a return from whence we have come.  We have returned, eleven years older and with the life experience of being parents and being married for over a decade.  Things have changed.  We have changed.

Yesterday we took the boys to the Desert Botanical Gardens.  It was a special evening event, self guided by flashlight.  We found snakes, toads, lizards, constellations…

We found the brick lined alcove, overhung by a stout, crooked-branched mesquite tree.  The place we exchanged our vows all those years ago.

Home.  I have collected several along my journeys.  This one, this dry and hot desert home, has called to me for a long time now.

I am glad to be home.