Thanksgiving playlist added 11/17/2022
Originally published December 17, 2019
Written on Thanksgiving 2019
The welcome home week is the 5 days preceding the Thanksgiving Day holiday. I call it this because it is the time of year when many families and friends, although dispersed throughout the universe make their way HOME. Wherever that place may be, whomever that place may contain. A time to be with the people who mean the most to you, in the place you are most comfortable. It is the beginning of the long winter holiday season, racing toward the end of the year and bright new beginnings.
They say that home is where the heart is, for the most part I suppose this is true. As I have grown older, I have come to notice there is a time in everyone’s lives, when they can no longer go “home”. As we age and the elders of our families begin to pass, the places that we called home sometimes pass along with them. I am not saying there is no place that is home, or a place that has that same level of comfort. It just becomes, no longer the same. The last 2 years for me have really come to highlight this more than ever having lost both my mother and little sister last year. I never realized how much a part of HOME they both were for me.
Trying to keep alive traditions of that former home are our way of remembering and preserving a feeling. A certain sense of warmth and acceptance, a place where the troubles of the world don’t matter. With the preservation of such traditions sometimes comes a certain amount of sadness. Knowing the people who once shared in them are no longer with us. Sometimes making the holidays close to unbearable for several years to come after such a loss. Sometimes something as simple as a pig can fill the eyes. ( I really miss you little sister)
I have also come to realize, that at some point perhaps we become home for the next generation. While we want so to pass these traditions on, sometimes we need to modify the existing or perhaps create new ones to share with those to whom we are home. We cannot live for the dead, we must live for the living, for they are the ones who need us now. It does not mean we have forgotten. It means that they have taught us, and left us with the knowledge and responsibility to be home for the next generation.
added 11/17/2022
From “Welcome Home” by Rehab
Welcome home
Where the faucets drip at night
Welcome home
Where the screen door don’t hang right
Welcome home
The only place you’ll ever fight
Because you love
Over and over again…….
What a beautiful day
Lookin back and thinkin bout the people that I’m missin
You can hear ’em in the breeze and the trees if ya listen
Some are in the ground and some are in prison
Now I remember momma hangin clothes on the line
Way back before I opened my mind
And got hip to the guilt, hard times, and fear
And I’m just damn glad to be here !
It is my belief that no one should spend Thanksgiving alone, and that no matter where you are in your journey through this thing, we call life there is something to be thankful for. If you are local and alone, please reach out and be a part of my HOME!!!
And a very special shout out and thank you to WMMR radio personality Pierre Robert for always carrying us through the week, and for making the radio station HOME for so many of us!!
For Dawn Marie Wellman and Janet A Chilson, I carry an emptiness since you left, and it never seems to subside. I am with you always!
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