Coming Home

 Maybe it wasn't the longest time that someone has been away from home, but a year and three months was the longest time for me. Roughly four hundred sixty-something days. Not that I keep track of how time moves around me, or anything... And it isn't really even the place that is home, as in the country, the city, the neighborhood district. Ukraine, Kharkov, Frutzendskii Rijon, respectively. It wasn't even about coming back to a place where I grew up, among dirt streets and cheap Russian cigarette smoke and leather European pumps, a life that no one in Oklahoma City could ever understand about me. Mostly, I think, it was coming back to something that was particularly mine. Something no one else could claim, no one else could take away from me. Something about lifestyle, about missions work of my parents in this city, about waking up on the other side of the planet, about my family just over in the next room. It was coming home. And the first thing about coming home was making a place to come to, for my own room had not yet been built in the attic of the church building. So it was a trip to the market of interior design and, voilà, the pieces of elegance I'd long since envisioned began to materialize into reality. But the crystal chandelier tipped in rose-gold finish wasn't all that the room required - but much grueling, hands on construction in a cloud of dust and dirt. If you can imagine, it was a welcome change of labor after so long in the restaurant industry. I'm glad I'm never going back to that, Lord willing. All I can say is, it has been good to be quiet for the summer. But now that summer is over, I have so enjoyed to be home.