Home to Be

I have been yearning to create a home. A home of warm simplicity—of hearth and hospitality, of fire and love (or perhaps they are one?). Where family and friends alike feel comfortable enough to curl up on the couch, fetch a cup from the cupboard without asking, and always look forward to returning to the peace that enfolded them there. A home of good smells and many blankets. A kitchen of splattered soapsuds and squealing laughter, a living room of too many wonderful books and timeworn furniture. A place that will etch itself into the hearts of my children, memories sweet and consoling, as mine are.

I was visiting Madonna House, sitting in the grass up in the hills where the farm lies, sleepy in the sunlight as I scraped beeswax from honey boxes. And it was then that Abba watered the seedling in my soul. My desire for marriage and motherhood began to shoot up toward the sky, free at last to grow by the Great Gardener’s handiwork. I had ventured into the rugged north of Ontario to discern a vocation to consecrated life, only to discover another path branching from this other. At first I wondered why He chose to reveal my path to me at such an ordinary moment, but in hindsight I understood why. Madonna House showed me that the ordinary is extraordinary, even if one is not aware that it is so.

I yearn for the ordinariness of the home . . . for in planting and tending and harvesting a garden, in cooking and baking for the man I love, in cuddling blue-eyed babies, in arranging pictures on the walls and dishes in the hutch, in lighting tapers after dusk, in polishing the windows to sparkling and opening them to the breeze, perhaps the Lord will come to me as He came to a virgin in Nazareth.