Rantings About Marriage

So, here's my warning. I'm going to say some pretty black and white statements about things such as marriage and singleness and such. I'm talking strictly about myself, and not as a general rule. Also, it seems, as I've gotten to writing a part of this already, I'm on a tangent from the original intent to express my joys and longings for marriage. I'll get to that soon.

Coming home to an empty house is such a sad event (see, this is one of those things I was referring to). I dislike every part of it. I dislike the cold feeling of a dark house, of a place that is exactly the way I left it. I dislike the large amount of space. Luckily, I am renting a very "lived in" house. Someone actually lives here full time. This isn't an apartment or dorm room that I'm just going to occupy for the next year or so. It's nice, knowing this is a home and not just a space.

But it's not my home.

I want a home. I don't care for much space, I've never needed it ( in terms of a dwelling place ). Heck, I currently sleep in a closet. I feel for the past several years now, I've not so much shared a room with my roommates, but I've simply been a guest in their room. In some ways, I'm very fortunate. My current and former roommates are clean people and have decently nice things and a nice sense of where things should go in a space. I'm grateful for those spaces and that I was able to occupy them, but I've never felt them to be "mine". It's never my room. I hope someday to maybe have a sense of that. A sense of belonging.

But I am an alien in these lands. Does an emissary ever feel at home in a foreign land?

I do long for space. I long for a good patch of wooded area right outside the house. I long for a lake within walking distance so I can take days off of work to teach my kids to swim in the summer. I long for the open air of the country, where you can actually see the stars at night, not just imagine them where they should be. Where crickets are louder than cars, and when the deafening silence catches you off-guard. I long to know my neighbors, to have cook-outs, to invite them over to dinner so our kids can play.
I long for long country roads, the kind where you can bike for miles and miles and never leave your own road. That, it seems, is as close to home as I can imagine. That was my home. 11580W 750N. I'll never forget that address as long as I live. It seems cruel that it was ripped away from me, at such a crazy and tumultuous time in my life. Divorces are a nasty business. We needed to sell the house. One parent alone could not keep up with the upkeep of it all. Mow the lawn, clean the cutters, rake the leaves, clean the roof, shovel the snow etc... And I'll never know to this day what kind of financial state my parents were in. Money was the one thing you did not talk about, especially when it was their money. Sure, we had droughts. Mom and Dad would be honest with us and say things are slow at work, or Dad would get laid off, and brother and I would just nod and understand. It's not like we had a lot to begin with, but we did fine with what we had.

I miss those days so much. Those days of a blissful ignorance of the way things really were. Of a time when friday nights meant a bonfire and the hardest decision of the week was who was going to host. No one ever really minded hosting, in fact some of us found pride in this, myself included. We learned how to use our space. That dug up hole in the ground, surrounded by rocks, man it has some stories to tell. Too much gasoline, eyebrows burned off, cans exploding up and over the house, fireworks going off without warning. And laughter. I enjoyed having people over. I didn't have much, but I learned quickly I did have space and on Friday and Saturday nights, it made me rich. People brought whatever they had lying around. Bag of chips here, some soda there, and on a good night, the local pizza shop would have some extra pizzas left over at the end of the night, and we would eat like kings.

But those days are gone. I am tempted to call them the "good ol' days" as one is wont to do. And those days are old, and they are good. But good days are ahead as well. And there have been good days since then. Bethel dorms, Wyoming mountains, Hawaiian Islands, streets of Mishawaka. It's a different type of good. A holy, wholly good, it seems.

And I'm engaged. I wish I could express the sheer joy and magnitude of this feeling welling up within me. I just never want her to leave. I'm sure, one day, I may want to leave (not in a totally give up sense of the phrase, but I'll need to get out of the house) and see some good guy friends, play some Euchre and drink some Jones or IBC, because beer doesn't taste good, and wine and Euchre just somehow don't fit. But right now, I want to come home to her, I want her to come home to me, I want to drive her to work and pack her a lunch and comfort her after long hard days and fall asleep next to her and wake up next to her. She is home. She will be family soon.

I don't have some deep conclusion to this, a lesson in which to draw from the many words I've used. I know there have been lessons along the way, but for now I'm content with getting this out of my head.