With the amount of thumbs up(s) on my Facebook post, I thought it might be time to re-emerge with some broken strains floating in my mind. Perhaps a weak writer is always looking for some support. But all self-deprecation placed aside, I felt lost wandering the streets of the Far East with all of the news back home. As I walked under blue skies, my thoughts were with a father picking up the rubble that once held doors he proudly locked to keep his family safe. I wanted to light the cigarette for the poor soul that pulled a limp child from the splintered boards and broken cinder blocks. I wanted to hold a stranger's hand as we prayed for healing or perhaps a sign much like the one shown to Noah. I wanted to cherish my President's words feeling a relief from the weariness of bi-partisanship and strife that fills our news.
But as faces passed me on the street that were oblivious to my home's pain, I began feeling a sharp pull back to the Ozarks. Rivers ran through my mind a little clearer, passing trees and neighbors' mailboxes from a car window promised a community better than I remembered, and my Emily's smile dripped sweeter. My childhood friend, living in Joplin as the winds came unbridled, haunted the next corner as if he might be waiting with a hand to pull me back with him so I could share the horror that he has come to know as the last week or so.
So as I celebrate the memorial of fallen soldiers in foreign battlefields, the silent tears of a mother thinking back on her daughter playing in the safest daycare in Oklahoma City, the workers still employed at Ground Zero, the homes lost in the Big Easy, the bowed head to a grave marker, I also remember you: Home.
