There’s No Place Like Home; Home Sweet Home...

I was thinking the other day about how when my husband and I were very young; our son was a baby, and we yearned for a place to live where the landlord wouldn’t raise our rent every year. I remembered how we dreamed of reaching that land over the rainbow, that place in life, where skies are blue, and the dreams that we were dreaming would really come true.

Back when we were dreaming our dream one of our favorite pastimes on the weekend was to gather up our son, who was still in diapers, and the three of us would pile into our Austin Healy Sprite, and go out for the day with a picnic lunch packed in the tiny trunk of our sports car. Down the freeway we would travel to neighborhoods in distant towns so we could look at and wish on stars that we possessed a home such as those we were looking at. We dreamed, we dared to dream, that some day we would live in such a place, which was just over the rainbow for us, at that place in our time.

Our dream had to be put on hold while we went about living very mundane, every day lives working at jobs that didn’t pay nearly what we were worth, and in my husband’s case going to school at night after working all day then working on homework assignments on the weekend. At least I had finished business school before I married, and started dreaming of rainbows and blue skies.

We settled for a small home built in the city, one that my husband built for us. It was not nearly as grand in style or size as those we gawked at on our weekend motoring trips but it was home sweet home for us for a very long time.

We continued to take weekend trips to the beach, motoring over the Santa Cruz Mountains to reach the beach of the tiny coastal town of the same name. When snow was flying on the wind in Lake Tahoe we would pack our suitcases into our tiny black Sprite, and follow the wind to the snow. To get over the icy mountain roads, silver colored, steel chains had to be applied to our tiny car’s wheels for traction, much like we applied long, smooth, wax covered skies to our own feet so we could traverse the packed snow.

We both continued to be frugal, which is a nice word for expressing that we were ‘cheap’ taking lunches to work, not going on expensive holidays every year. I sewed most of my clothes the first ten years we were married. I wished on many first evening stars during those years we lived in the city.

In time our small city nest that my husband built for us, appreciated in value as sometimes happens with small city nests located in small cities that grow up to be big cities.

When the grown up city became too noisy and too dirty for us we decided to follow those blue birds we often heard about in song that fly over rainbows. That’s what we did, we flew the coop just like those blue birds do, and we went right over that rainbow landing in Hollister, California where our dream that we dreamed as youngsters has come true.

There is no place like home; home sweet home.

Carol Garnier Dutra

Events in this short story come from our lives, Richard Dutra and Carol Garnier Dutra.
Copyright © 2010 by Carol Garnier Dutra
.