Home Sweet Home

Friday Five: Love the One You're With

Katherinezj has posted today’s Friday questions:

This Friday Five will post while I'm at the beach which for me is more than a vacation destination, it is a trip home. I have found it quite easy to wax nostalgic about the places I used to live (well, except for one) and have begun to wonder what it is I like about the place I'm living now? For instance I sure do love the beach.


And so I ask you to please name five things you like about where you are living now... and as your bonus - 1 thing you don't like.

1. I have just moved back to my family home after being gone for almost 40 years. My parents are dead but my brother and his family live in the area. I feel connected to family once again even though we are not emotionally close. I am just sorry I couldn’t have gotten back here before mom died. But her memories abound.

2. Even though we have not gotten really unpacked (we cannot even get a small car into the 2 car garage, I love our house. It is all on one floor. It is light and fairly easy to clean.

3. When I attended the clergy periscope study last week, a couple of the older priests began to use phrases like “He’s all hat and no cattle” and “it’s dryer than a Sunday afternoon in Abilene”. Such phrases are ‘Texasisms’. Molly Ivins made them famous and Dubyah made them infamous. But they are wonderfully cornpone sets of word pictures that convey so much. I think when I left the state in ’72, I wanted to get away from that kind of speech judging it ignorant and backwards. But over the years I have found such ways of describing things ready on my lips, falling back into rather homespun ways of describing that which cannot be described except in rather artful phrases and humor.

4. Ft. Worth is much larger than Binghamton, NY where we were living. It is nice to be able to go to many different restaurants and not have to duplicate or have a choice of which doctor we can go to or hospital system. Yes, the traffic is a bit heavier, but the road system is easy and so far we have not had to sit in too much traffic.

5. The Church here is one in major transition. The diocese is the remnant of a diocese that chose to leave the Episcopal Church rather than welcome women and LGBT people in the ministry. I was never able to celebrate here when I was active. When I would visit my family, I gave up on going to church. It just wasn’t welcoming. Now, the change is remarkable. The lay folk of the diocese have found their spines and have thrown off a culture of repression by the bishops and clergy of the schismatics. It is fun to be around recently liberated people who are just learning to be Church. It is wonderful to be around joyful Christians.

Bonus: THE HEAT. I am not fond of heat and I knew that I would find it difficult. Getting into one’s car after coming out of A/C is like walking into an oven. But J. swears by the sun. She loves sitting under the pecan tree or even baking out the permafrost of upstate NY winters. But I love the idea of wearing shorts (even tho I don’t look good in them) and sandals everyday and most of all not having a clock that regiments my day.