Finding your way back home again...

I am on the road a great deal traveling the blacktop weaving my way across, around and up and down the state of North Carolina. I leave in the early morning hours at the beginning of the week and return four days later. They say once you leave you can never go home again, and whoever "they" happens to be, I choose to disagree. I have traveled the road leading to nowhere many times, and the wheels always point me in the right direction: wherever home is at the time.

On the road I meet lots of interesting folk. Something can be said about living in the rural south where the people are friendly, the tea sweet and the peaches aplenty. After living in cities most of my adult life, I find myself in my travels returning to those spaces where everybody knows your name.

I am reminded of the song "Life in a Northern Town" by Sugarland. High on the hill on Prospect Street, the house of gray still stands tall and my parents, they still live there as well. A place of their own for over fifty years where they raised a family of seven, which in and of itself, is no small feat.

I am reminded that going home happens over and over again when something new sparks a memory, a thought or an idea experienced long ago.

And when I visit the woman alongside the road at the peach stand, in some crazy way, she reminds me of Geraldine. She was a neighbor up the road who would run out of the house on those days when the football would find its way over the fence. Instead of tossing it back, she scooped it up in her hands and the white robe, which matched the color of her hair, would lift her as she speed streaked back to her front porch.

The football. It was lost forever.....

.....until one day, her husband Charlie brought a box and once opened, an assortment of balls were filled to the brim. We graciously thanked him for his kindness not letting on that we knew. We could see in it his eyes knowing that the one thing he wanted most to come home was finally home.

Where are the sparks in your life found? Go in search of these treasures and you, too, will find yourself returning home time and time again... until next time...-Teach