FOR GOOD, PLEASE AND THANK YOU, and this lamp.

Home grew wings a long time ago, now. It fledged while I lived there after dropping one life for another, entirely ill-fitting life.

Home is made of things carried from the first home to all of the next homes, none Home, not since Gram and Papa died. My little home was next to their big home, and everything in my life was right there. Some bits came and went, but that was the axis, the fulcrum, the sun.

Home is always where I am, because I have filtered through each home to refine what needs to exist in the next home. This happens every time home changes, because in between the culling times, I collect things that feel like home. Some of them have set me back as much as two hundred dollars. That was the most, second most one twenty-five, maybe twice. I still have those things, and so many more that come from dollar sales because I am patient at the flea market most of the time and I know how long I might have to wait until a pricy thing becomes a regular thing and then the final resting place, the dollar table. Patience is helpful, I remember, when I am once again culling for a move and remembering that exceptional chaise lounge that went right before my eyes or a set of champagne coupes, a stack for a buck, that someone had nabbed on my trip back around the tables to find them again. I do not like packing champagne coupes; therefore, I am often on the hunt for stacks of them for a dollar.

Home is going to change again this summer. High confidence that this will really happen. I’ve begun to cull my things. It’s going along gangbusters. There are contracts signed and escrow companies and inspections coming so turbo-fast soon. If there’s a problem with the charming little place, the loan may not be spent on that particular charming little place. It has a study and a workshop. Guess who longs for what room. The things we carry with us to studies and shops will, through the powers of my timely austerity and desire to preserve my own energy, be thinned a bit.

Home, the things that fill it, fill us. Carrying the important things any distance makes us stronger, and gives them value that only we can appraise.

Home seems to be ready to rest again, wherever we land in the town we call Home.