Out Home

This is a photo of our family home on Bunker Hill. The only home I knew growing up. It's just a single photo and a thousand memories. I called Momma last night and read her the journaling and took her back with my memories to a simpler time, well simpler for me but I'm sure a much more physical, demanding time in her life.

This was created with a new kit from Maddy Fernandez called Nuts About You at Digitals. It's a great fall kit, if you haven't used Maddy's things there is no time like the present to check them out and see what you've been missing.

Jouranling Reads:
What is this you ask, a photo of a house? No it’s a photo filled with so many memories I don’t know where to begin. This is our home, the only one I ever knew, on Bunker Hill in the Southwestern part of Washington State.

When Mom and Dad moved here it was a small 3 room house with no running water, no indoor plumbing except in the kitchen and a trek from Longview, the closest town. With determination, inner strength and a love for one another they built it into the home you see before you. And it was a home, not a house, but a home, filled with laughter, huge family dinners and always people. Friends came on vacation from California that knew the folks when they lived there, neighbors from the hill or town, family from near or far. Everyone came to see the folks, visit, laugh and enjoy the newest baked goods coming from Mom’s oven. California visitors relished in the spring water that flowed year round to our home and for many years my Uncles as well on up the road. Nothing will ever compare to that wonderfully clear, very cold water we always took for granted.

When you look at the picture you see these beautiful Maple trees. Dad had a spike in the one by the driveway for years trying to glean the sap like the NE trees. The big oil truck would come to feed the oil drum for the oil furnace in the living room, It had a little door that swung open to light it, and it’s warmth drew our little turtles we had one year, but that wasn’t a good thing for them.

To the right of the picture, not in the view but in my mind were the holly trees. We had several different kinds of holly. Mom would pick them along with fir boughs and send them to our relatives down south so they could have a little piece of us with them through the Christmas Holiday.

It never seemed a big place, just lots of wide open space, clean fresh air and trees everywhere you looked. So much of nature surrounded this home, walnut trees, blackberries, huckleberries along the culverts up the road, apples crisp and sweet their flesh as white as could be except for the pink blush in the middle. Necterberries that grew under the clothesline that stretched down the back yard, bing cherries that turned your lips deep purple and your hands to match, how wonderful to sit in the fork of the cherry tree and just eat to your hearts content.

This picture is way back before Daddy planted the laurel hedge that edged the driveway and across the front. But it’s so wonderful to gaze at the porch and see yourself there a hundreds times, coming and going. It’s always a joy to go ‘Out Home’ even though now I must do it in my heart and in my soul.