There is a pale evening light casting its frosty breath through the windows of the sun porch.  It's weak illumination reaches one arm of the couch, then runs out.  In the shadowy bosom of the couch is a sleeping figure swaddled in a red and white wool blanket.  The television flickers a blue light on the wall behind him.  I can hear the chatter of the Gilmore Girls from underneath the red-headed hermit's door when I take off my headphones.  As the western light fades further, the kitchen is beginning to glow with the yellow light of the floor lamp by the big iron basin.

Sometimes, these days, the coming darkness sparks panic or a resigned despair: there goeth the entire weekend and I have not even finished the work that would make missing it worth it somehow.  I dwell in the present moment and the logic of present sacrifice for future gain is cold comfort.  But tonight I feel the warm glow of home.  I feel my thoughts slide quietly westward with the sun to the other home.  I see the pattern of the branches cast as shadows in that same pale evening strain on the brown carpeting where it now slides across smooth wood floor.  The warm glow of the kitchen light reminds me someone must now be assembling ingredients for tacos in my other home.  I warm this home in the blanket swathing the Beloved.  Its twin might even now be spread across my mother's lap with a warm circle whence the teacup was lifted.  I am facing northward and even now, my father might also be forgetting to turn a light on, absorbed in the white glow of a Word document. 

I hear the muffled footsteps of a sister in my present home; I can feel her, too, casting thoughts back across the flatlands to the frosty highlands. Our minds search for the wisdom we found there: how to make a home, carry it with you, be courageous, hopeful, faithful, tenacious.  Sometimes this is practical advice, words echoing in our minds, or habits, but most of the time I look around that home when I am lonely and lost.  This kind of yearning for home, a phone call will never sate.  This is the compiled conversation of childhood, this is the kind of timeless, crystalline vision that binds time and distance together.  This exercise is not self-indulgent comfort for when I see that little home among the clapboard herd out on the prairie, I see the dark blue exterior fade into the dark.  I see the wind whipping at the windows of my childhood. And I see my parents lining those windows with plastic--Saran Wrap against the teeth of the howling wind.  Faith is not without worry, it is not without hope, and mercy is a drafty house still standing on the prairie.  It takes strength of will to cast a small, steady, warm glow against the enormity and miscellany of life.  It is truly an awesome undertaking to bundle these small, sturdy things into my heart and go forth.  When I am clutched by desperation, when I am drowning in the enormity or the miscellany I retrieve these things, these memories and new-old creations and I begin at home.  I hold these things in my hands, work them around, kneading and clutching, sliding a thumb across the smooth spots, pressing the ridges into my palms until they begin to glow.  Then I sit in the warmth of my homes, worry less, wonder more, and am comforted.