Happy Sunday, friend!

I was supposed to be writing this week's letter from Pennsylvania.

Craig and I had plans to spend the weekend in Bedford County, where we were both raised, to celebrate my mother-in-law's 80th birthday. I've been thinking about the trip for weeks, and somewhere along the way it got me thinking about home.

Which is a little ironic because, at the last minute, I decided to stay home.

Our youngest Ava decided to come home this weekend, and for a few reasons, staying here with her just felt like where I needed, and wanted, to be. Craig was completely supportive, so instead of getting on a plane, I'm here.

And the relief I felt when I made that decision actually surprised me a little.

Apparently I've been thinking about the meaning of home while at the same time being given an opportunity to choose it.

And this weekend, I chose home.

The idea of home has always been a little complicated for me.

I lived in Pennsylvania for the first 22 years of my life, 18 of them in a blue, three-bedroom Victorian house on Palmer Street in the tiny town of Hopewell. Population 189. Did I mention TINY?

It’s not even a stop light small. But our house sat in the shadow of the Appalachians with the Raystown Branch of the Juniata River running through our backyard. Which was pretty much the ideal place for a nature-loving little girl with a vivid imagination to grow up.

My grandparents, aunts and uncle lived right across the street. My childhood best friend, Kelly, lived next door. We met when we were 4 and spent entire summers outside together, skipping rocks, always barefoot and doing whatever else two little girls could dream up when nobody was tracking their location on an iPhone. 😂

There was a grape arbor in our yard and a big apple tree out back. By late August, the fallen apples would start fermenting in the grass and the whole area would have this particular sweet smell and be absolutely covered in bees!

I knew what that meant. Stings between my toes.

Well that and school was coming and my early September birthday was just around the corner!

I've written before about how the light starts changing this time of year. I think maybe I first learned to notice that there in the front room of our house on Palmer Street. The August sun would get a little more golden and the mountains would become dark silhouettes in the late afternoon. Summer wasn't over yet, but you could feel that something new was coming.

I was always an observer, even then. I remember sitting on the sidewalk watching ants or staring at a single blade of grass for what seemed like forever. I could spend hours outside exploring along the river or disappearing into my own little world.

My childhood was complicated in plenty of ways, but my connection to that place wasn't.

That house, the river, the mountains, my family across the street, Kelly next door and the freedom I had to wander around and notice things formed so much of who I became.

My parents sold the house about ten years ago, and my immediate family has all moved away. It's strange knowing when I drive down Palmer Street today, I'm driving past a stranger's house.

The place still exists but the version I'm remembering doesn't.

The Homes We Make

Pennsylvania wasn't the only home I've had trouble leaving.

Craig and I had our little starter-home chapter, back in 1999 when we were newlywed babes at 25 and 27 and had absolutely no idea how many chapters were still ahead of us.

It's where we fumbled through early marriage and discovered we have VERY different ideas about dishwasher loading and many other things. 😂 We argued over paint colors, bit off more than we could chew with home improvement projects and planted trees that are still there.

We brought home one baby and sent two more off to kindergarten. We enjoyed simpler times with little luxuries like $5 pizza and $1 Redbox movie nights.

There were so many of our firsts there. Eventually we outgrew that house and moved into the one where we'd spend the next 14 years.

That's the one that really became our family's home. Our kids grew up there.

I can still picture them sitting at the kitchen table doing homework while I made dinner. I can hear them shouting to us over the catwalk instead of walking approximately 20 feet to find us. 😂 The elementary school was right across the street. We taught all three kids how to drive there, watched endless hours of their sports and celebrated holiday after holiday. Most of our family traditions were born there.

And outside of our house, we had a real community. Friends, neighbors, schools, familiar faces everywhere. Eventually our kids' friends worked in the stores and restaurants we went to. We always saw someone we knew everywhere we went.

For 14 years, our life happened there. Then six years ago, we moved into what I thought would be our forever home, our dream home.

And I do love it so!

I love our land and the giant pecan and oak trees. I love sitting on the side porch listening to the birds and hearing the crickets at night. I love looking out and seeing the horses. I love having enough space around me to breathe. I love that for a brief moment in time, all three adult kids were able to live here and make memories too.

There are still moments when the doors are open, a light breeze is blowing, sunlight is dappling through the trees and I think, I cannot believe I get to live here!

Yet for quite awhile after we moved into our literal dream house, there were days when all I wanted was to go home. And by home, I meant the house we'd just left.

I could love where I was and still ache for where I'd been.

It wasn't because we'd made the wrong decision. The kids were getting older, our family was changing, and we'd left behind a chapter of our lives that I wasn't quite ready to understand was ending.

You can pack up all of your furniture and bring it with you, but you cannot pack up the version of your life that happened inside a house.

Maybe that's what I was actually missing. Not the house.

Us, in that house.

What Makes a Place Home?

I felt something similar when my parents sold Palmer Street.

I'd been gone for decades and had my own home and family in Texas and wasn't going back to Pennsylvania very often. But somehow knowing they were there, and knowing it was there, had always felt like an anchor to me.

Stable and held in place.There was still one little spot on the map where I knew exactly where I came from.

And then there wasn't.

Maybe all of these houses are teaching me something I couldn't have understood when I was younger.

Home was never really the house.

It was my grandparents across the street and Kelly next door.

It was Craig and me figuring out how to be grown-ups together.

It was backpacks dropped by the door, homework at the kitchen table and kids yelling down from the catwalk.

Now it's grown kids coming back through the door. It's Craig and me taking the golf cart out at night with our dog Skye. It’s birds and horses and crickets and coffee on the side porch.

The houses held those things.

They're containers for versions of ourselves we don't want to lose.

The Anchor

As Craig and I explore this next chapter, I've realized that I still want an anchor.

I want a home base. Somewhere that feels unmistakably ours to come back to. I want to be close to our adult kids and part of their lives, especially as spouses and someday grandkids make our family bigger.

But I want freedom too.

I want to travel more and try on different places. I want to spend longer stretches somewhere cooler when Texas feels like opening the door and walking out into an air fryer (like now). 😂 Maybe someday we'll spend part of the year near a beach?

I don't know exactly what that looks like yet.

And that's interesting (annoying?) for someone like me, because I've spent a lot of my life believing that feeling safe meant knowing what came next.

I've always been really good at making a plan. But I'm starting to understand something about anchors.

They can give us steadiness and keep us from drifting. And sometimes we need to pull them up so we can explore.

The tricky part is knowing the difference between something that's keeping you grounded and something that's keeping you stuck.

Right now, this home still feels like a place I deeply love coming back to. So I'm allowing this chapter to remain unfinished.

I don't need to know whether we'll live here for another three years or twenty-three. I don't need to decide today whether we'll eventually live closer to one of our kids, spend summers somewhere else or try on an entirely different version of life.

I can have an anchor without promising I'll never pull it up. And I can explore without knowing where I'll eventually land.

Which brings me back to this weekend. I was supposed to go back to Pennsylvania. But Ava was coming home. And as the weekend got closer, I realized I didn't want to leave.

So I didn't.

This sounds like such a small thing when I write it out. Grown woman decides not to take a trip! Hardly groundbreaking. 😂

But I think it meant something bigger to me.

I've spent a lot of my life being very good at following through. If something is on the calendar, I do it. If I've made a commitment, I honor it. If changing plans inconveniences someone else, I'm probably going to convince myself that I'm fine and go anyway.

Showing up is a good thing and I value that about myself. But I'm learning there's a difference between being dependable and automatically overriding yourself.

This time I stopped long enough to ask what I actually wanted.

I wanted to be home when Ava walked through the door.

And once I admitted that to myself, the decision felt surprisingly simple. Maybe home isn't necessarily the house that holds the most memories or the place where we've lived the longest.

Maybe home is wherever the life we most want to be present for is happening now.

Right now, that's here under the pecan and oak trees, on the side porch, with the birds and the crickets and our animals. In this house where Craig and I are figuring out this strange, beautiful empty-nest chapter together.

And for me, this weekend with one of our grown kids coming back through the door.

Our house isn't where our kids spent most of their childhoods, but somewhere along the way, it became their home too. It's where they come for holidays and dinners and those increasingly fewer random weekends when we're lucky enough to get them.

Palmer Street was that place for me for a long time. And I've realized something through all of this:

I still really love being the keeper of home.

That doesn't mean I need my kids to need me the way they once did. And it doesn't mean Craig and I won't travel, explore other places or someday decide this house and all this land are way more anchor than we need.

It just means that right now, this anchor still feels like exactly that.

An anchor, not a weight.

There may come a time when pulling it up feels right.

This weekend, staying right here did.

So I stayed home.

🌱 This Week's Breadcrumb

I've spent a lot of time thinking about my own definition of home this week, but now I'm curious about yours.

What makes somewhere feel like home to you now?

Is it a place? A person? A feeling? A tradition? Has your definition of home changed as you've gotten older?

Hit reply and tell me.

I've absolutely loved reading every single one of your responses to these weekly Breadcrumbs. Some of you have shared incredibly personal stories with me, and I don’t take that lightly. I can't personally respond to every message, but please know that I do read them. And lately, as I've been reading, I keep thinking the same thing:

I wish you could read and respond to each other's answers.

Because I don't want these conversations to only happen between you and me. I want you to be able to encourage the woman who's navigating something you've already walked through. I want you to share the thing you're trying and hear from someone who says, me too. I want us to have somewhere to continue these conversations together.

So I've decided to create a place.

I'm keeping it intentionally small, simple and outside of social media. A quieter corner of the internet for women navigating all kinds of changing seasons to connect, share our weekly Breadcrumbs, encourage each other and figure some of this out together.

I'm putting the finishing touches on it now, and I'll tell you more very soon. ❤️

xo

Alison