Home Is Where The Heart Is

It's always strange when you are in a place that's not your home. Home can mean a lot of things to a lot of people but home has always been, for us anyway,(my wife and I), where we and our kids are. We travel for a living and have for most of their lives growing up, so home was "us" not a place. I have always lived in Texas so I have come to live in the central part just at the edge of West Texas, the part I like the most. We have family east and south of where we live so central is best. I like west Texas because it is still fairly rural and some of the biggest ranches in the country are within a short drive and still do things the old way, that is, taking out the wagon for the big works in Spring and Fall. Regardless of the changes that have taken place in the world with urbanization and technology, it has only made it more important that we keep that way of life alive. That may seem unnecessary to urbanites who still think milk comes from the grocery store, but the fact is that once something is extinct we miss it and regret its extinction even if we never thought of it or needed it before. The extinction of the west, it's farming and ranching communities, and the lifestyle they at least once represented, will be missed when it is gone. Especially when the urbanites get hungry. There are cultural things about the city that are good and enjoyable even to me but just like a person who has lost a limb, it takes all parts of the body to make a whole. The Bible even says that every part of the body, however small and seemingly insignificant is important and must be there for the body to be whole. We are slowly losing a limb by the way we have become so urban minded and in many ways ignorant to the ways of and the need for the rural and it's way of existence. As I said at the outset, it is always strange when you are in a different place from what you are used to. However, it seems there is a sort of brotherhood that exists wherever I go. I am drawn to the people who's lives revolve around farming, ranching, and especially horses. Wether they are draft horses, ranch horses, polo, or race horses, there is something about them that draws us together. It may be just a nod in a restaurant from another cowboy hat wearing stranger, or a man wearing an apron in the back of a saddle shop running an oversized sewing machine to build or repair the most important tool of the cowboy trade, the saddle. Either way, I continue to feel welcomed. Not just in the big hat turned up on the sides west Texas ranches where I spend so much time, but also on the flat hat buckaroo outfits of the northwest where their handmade gear makes my imagination run wild like a little boy in the toy department just before Christmas. I feel more at home with strangers on a horse than I do with some people I have known for years. I don't know why that is but it has to be the horses that do it. They are the common denominator. There's just something about them that is amazing. All of the mystery of God and His creation wrapped up inside a beautifully powerful and, at the same time, delicate creature. It is because of this creature that the strangeness of a new place can disappear in an instant and feel just a little more like home. Not "home" but a little closer to it.