The Joy of Coming Home
posted by Tim Nafziger on 04/14/08 at 12:31 AMAt 2:05 pm on Saturday, April 5 I arrived home.
It was three months to the day after I left for Colombia. Thought I spent a month at home between Colombia and Vietnam, this winter has been a period of an exceptional variety of international travel for me, probably more then I'll have again for a very long time. And frankly, I'm glad to be done.
Over the last week, I've happily nestled back into routines and habits, free from any big trips or events on the horizon. There has been time to travel and now there is time to be home.
This afternoon around supper time the sun was shining and big puffy clouds were rolling across the sky and I decided to walk down to the lake and take some photos of signs of spring. Though the beach turned out to be significantly colder and windier then anticipated, I immediately found my friend and fellow Living Waterite Julian and his two sons, Liam and Elijah. We whiled away an hour playing games with robots and mazes and jumping off the pier before they invited me over to their house for hot chocolate.
Sharing hot chocolate turned into an invitation to supper and we all pitched in to make a classic salad-of-available-vegetables. Later we discussed the finer points of conservation of energy, electricity generation and robotics with Liam over cucumber, red cabbage and avocados.
And that's what home is for me: spontaneous suppers on Sunday nights with precocious six year olds. In Roger's Park
Photos from my walk
Tim Nafziger is a activist, writer, organizer and web developer. He lives in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago with his wife Charletta where he attends Living Water Community Church. Recently, he helped to start the Young Anabaptist Radicals blog. For more about his life, read his first blog post.
I can relate to those feelings of returning home. You described them well.