By Vicki Bahr 
Two years ago this very night, I sat in this very chair in front of this very window, surrounded by more moving boxes filled with our possessions than I ever thought possible on the first night in our new home.
Someone had put sheets and pillows and a comforter on our bed, and I could see into our bedroom from where I sat, wondering how soon I could graciously be excused from the towers of boxes that would very likely never be emptied in our lifetimes so that I could just walk into that bedroom and plop my weary bones onto the bed and look out the wide expanse of uncovered window at the dark farmland behind us and the rumbling trains that would pass in the night.
We were home.
We had signed entirely too many papers; way more than we had 46 years before when we bought our first and only home . . . until the day before we moved. We had taken on another mortgage, something we never figured we would do again, and yet we were still smiling.
There were three shiny sets of keys on the kitchen island, a microwave and stove that had lights on them to tell the time that I worried would keep me awake all night unless I closed the bedroom door. And even then, there was still the nearly full moon outside the window that was just the opposite direction of our old home where the sun came up in the back of the house and woke us each morning.
So much new to get accustomed to, so many fears that we were too old to be doing this. Who were we fooling? How would we explain to all the young couples who would soon be moving in all around us that, yes, we were retired and grandparents nine times over, and we had raised our kids and were done with all the things they were just beginning to do in their lives?
Our furniture was vintage, our television was small, but we were just as excited as we had been the first night we had tucked our two young sons into their beds at the old house 46 years before.
And now, two years later, I sit here and smile because it has all worked out so perfectly. The microwave and stove lights are my comforting beacons in the night, the moos of the cows and rumble of the trains are soothing reassurances that we are indeed home.
The boxes were eventually emptied, well, except for the couple under the stairs that we haven’t gotten to quite yet. I am in awe daily of having a dishwasher for the first time in our lives as well as a garage for the first time, and a main floor laundry for the first time as well as a remarkably cozy pantry that I love to stand in the middle of, take stock in, and just smile. And, of course, there’s a wide-open floor plan that can accommodate all 19 of us when we are blessed enough to be together as a family.
We sit together often, John and I, in our matching white plastic Adirondack chairs on the small deck we added at the back of the house last year, and watch the sun set . . . no words necessary. We are home.
by Alexis Linehan 
by Heather McGuire 
by Jenny Vanderberg Shannon 
