Home Alone

After weeks of a house bursting with family and activity, following weeks on the road with people, ‘home alone’ is singularly inviting. Only the grandcats skitter around the rooms or curl contentedly on the down quilt at the foot of the bed.

Yesterday was packed. Exercise. Driver and Co to the airport to visit the Dragon – (and then they were stuck for hours in transit because of silly blush of snow on the East coast -- phone calls and decisions.) A morning with 50+ local Moms of Pre-Schoolers to discuss the influence of visual media on little people. Evening at the auction of the local academy where I now serve as a regent. Home to a long phone conversation with the absent husband as he drove south from Boston.

Today dawns clear and cold and empty of people. Rise when I choose, eat what I choose, work at my own pace. Down to the basement to continue sorting through nonsense collected over years. Laundry to process. A tad of shopping. Study time in Colossians for the upcoming couples retreat in December. Dinner on my own, with a good book. Perhaps a movie, again of my own choosing.

Home alone. No one to feed -- except the insistent cats who try to convince me they are starving. No one to ask questions. No one to interrupt my train of thought. Even the phone is gloriously silent.

Tomorrow the Dreamer, the Engineer, and the little grands will gather after church for the Sunday tradition and the house will be full of noise and laughter and conversation. The husband will fly in from New England and the Driver and Tech and grand #4 will fly home from Philadelphia. There will be no silence, no peace, no quiet.

One day home alone is bliss. A life of home alone would be desperately lonely.

“Sing to God, sing praise to his name, extol him who rides on the clouds -- his name is the LORD-- and rejoice before him. A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families…” Ps. 68:4-6