Okay, I'm Going To Cry

Reading some news headlines, this caught my eye: "Here's why you'll see smoke today along Interstate 80/35." Curious I clicked on it to read the story and a photo of an old farm house was shown. My first thought was to wonder where along I80/35 it was. Then I looked a little closer.

Now, I am crying. It is our old home. It is the house I brought my two youngest, Kari and Preston, home from the hospital to live for the first nine and seven years of their lives. Oh, my, the memories. The pigs we raised in the chicken house. The kids learning to ride their first bicycles down the lane. The time I tried burning an old, dead tree in the front yard and flames shot up into the night sky and people started driving by to see what was going on.
Doug and his friends playing in the creek and all of us cleaning up the ditch along the road where people had been dumping their garbage. The apple trees. The pine grove and 'my three trees' in the field at the end of the grove. Trying to keep that huge yard mowed. The garden spot and the year I started my own tomato seeds and ended up with 75 tomato plants - more tomatoes than I knew what to do with, so Doug pulled a wagon load at a time down to the nearby campgrounds and sold them to the campers.

The old barn where Doug had his clubhouse and where he found an early 1900's Coca Cola bottle of the pre-hourglass design.

The patch of orange poppies I stood Kari in front of each May to take her birthday photos.
All the flowers along the lane and how we got snowed in during the blizzard of '73 when the drifts in the lane were impossible to scoop out.

All the beautiful summer days we spent playing in the plastic wading pool, hunting rocks to polish out in the field south of the barn, wading in the creek and just enjoying life together.

(This picture of the house actually burning was shown on KCCI after I posted. I've added it to the blog for future reference.)


When the cardinal sings from the redbud tree
And ghosts of the mists ascend
And the evening star is a lamp in the skies
And summer is near its end --
It's oh, for the fence and the leafy lane,
And dusk and dew and home again!

I've had so many recurring dreams of once again living in this place - not just the house, but the place. I've always awakened wondering what those dreams meant.
I feel so sad, yet so very grateful for the wonderful memories of living here with my children.