HOME – “SWEET” – HOME … ?

(circa 1966)

“Home” is such a sweet, comforting word and can encompass many factors – not exclusively the place where you live.  You may feel at home in a certain situation or a comfortable place or with certain people.  Yes, I had just stepped off the plane in the little Army town of Killeen, Texas.  I had never been there before (and didn’t really want to be there) but I was finally in the strong arms of my handsome, Army-fatigue-clad husband.  I was finally “home”.

He led me to our car, hefted my suitcase into the trunk and helped me into the car with my huge basket purse containing our now-well-traveled, wide-eyed, traumatized little parakeet, Foxy.  And we were off to our new “home”.

Killeen – it’s a small Texas town, solely existing for the purpose of serving the huge Army base of Fort Hood.  Its “downtown” consisted of the normal, unremarkable small-town shops and businesses (a far cry from the bustling metropolis of Los Angeles that I had grown up in).  Oh well, this was just temporary – and it was kind of quaint.  (Hey, I am trying to be positive here…)

After leaving “downtown”, we drove through the residential streets, consisting of small houses and apartments that were nearly 100% rental properties for soldiers and their families.  As we rounded the corner of Parmer Ave. & 18^th St. I got my first look at our new “home”: a one-story four-unit apartment building.  Our apartment was the first unit on the left.  Bill had picked it out and had unpacked the household furnishings that I had sent via Greyhound bus the week before.  He had everything ready.

We pulled into the driveway, unloaded the car and unlocked the door.  (Again, Bill did not carry me over the threshold – no excuses offered this time.  Hmmm.  Could it be that I’m not a small person?)  We walked in and there we stood, in the middle of our new home: our one-bedroom, one-bathroom, “furnished” apartment that cost $50/per month.  It really wasn’t bad.  It had pine tongue-and-groove walls and wood floors.  Its decor was, what we affectionately called, “early unclaimed freight”.  Nothing fancy but adequate for us.  And so our new life began.

And here I will present several vignettes to describe our apartment:

• Our apartment had no air conditioning – only a swamp cooler and if I thought it was hot and steamy in April when I arrived, it only got worse as summer progressed.  Summer nights were spent lying in bed in a pool of sweat, with a bottle of calamine lotion and cotton balls by my side.  I would wake up numerous times throughout the night, dabbing calamine lotion all over my body, trying to alleviate the itching caused by the hundreds of mosquito bites that plagued me.  When I awoke in the morning, my hair would be so wet I would have to dry it before I could brush it.

• A single guy lived next to us.  There was a gap above our common wall that would radiate light from his apartment into our bedroom late at night.  Sometimes he would come home drunk in the wee hours in the morning and we would be serenaded by his puking.  Other times when we would be eating dinner in our little kitchen a distinctive odor would emanate from behind the wall – and then we would hear his toilet flush.

• Thankfully we became good friends with the neighbors on the other side of us.  Calling them on the phone was a challenge though.  In those days we had party lines which meant we had to share our phone line with 4 other families and our neighbors happened to be one of those.  So if we wanted to call them, we would have to lift the receiver, dial one number to get rid of the dial tone and then beat on the wall 3 times to tell them to pick up the phone so we could talk with them.

• Not too long after acquiring our apartment, we bought an old, used TV from a pawn shop in town.  It worked fine except for one problem:  the picture would flip every few seconds.  After a while we discovered that if we blew air into the back of the TV to cool its tubes it would stop the picture from flipping.  So we placed the TV directly in front of the swamp cooler.  It worked okay – that is, until winter time when the temperature dropped to 18 degrees … and we had the cooler blowing!

…and then there was the City of Killeen:

• On hot, sultry summer nights we would sit outside on our front porch, vainly trying to catch a cooling breeze, enjoying the sight of fireflies dancing in the air – that is, until a city truck would drive by, fogging the air with diesel fuel in a futile attempt to abate mosquitoes, sending us scrambling back inside so we could breathe.

• And then there was the city sewer.  It was an open sewer that, if it didn’t evaporate enough, they would STIR its contents to help the process.  Yes, it did help evaporate the sewage.  However, it also sent the fragrance of raw sewage wafting throughout the town.

• Oh, and I have to tell you about CRICKET SEASON!!  For a couple of weeks during late summer the area would be INUNDATED with hundreds of thousands of crickets.  You couldn’t walk on a downtown sidewalk without stepping on dozens of them:  crunch, crunch, crunch.  The town smelled like insecticide and dead crickets would be piled high in the gutters and against buildings.  One little cricket found its way through our bathtub drain and made his tiny home behind the overflow drain cover.  Every day he would make himself known by waving his little feelers from behind the drain cover.  So I tried to take care of the situation.  Whenever I took a bath I tried to fill the tub to the top in hopes of drowning him.  No matter hard I tried, sure enough, he would show up the next day, undaunted, waving his little feelers at me.  However, one day he didn’t show up.  Apparently my efforts were successful.  I should have been happy, but now I felt oddly regretful.  Surprisingly, I had come to like the little guy.  We had become friends of sorts – and I had killed him.  Now I missed my little bathing companion.

• Texas is the home of a vast array of creepy crawly creatures, the most famous of which, are cockroaches – big … huge … cockroaches!  Woe be the unfortunate soul who steps into their kitchen in the middle of the night and turns on the light, only to be greeted by hundreds of cockroaches scrambling across every bare surface to hide in the cupboards and crevices.  (I’d hide too if I were that ugly.)  Thankfully, our apartment had a good pest control program so we didn’t have much of a cockroach problem.  However, our best friends across the street had to deal with them every day.  We did have other “visitors” every now and then though.  There was one memorable “visitor” in particular.  He was some kind of beetle, about 4 inches long and had the most intriguing blue and green iridescent body, actually quite beautiful.  However, I did not want him in my home.  I am not usually afraid of critters so I fearlessly got a shoe in my hand and started beating him.  He did not die.  So I beat him with other, increasingly heavier, more lethal kitchen utensils.  He still wouldn’t die.  Then I got an empty tuna can and tried to squash him with the edge of the can, putting all my weight on top of it.  When I finished, he insolently raised his head and continued to walk resolutely across my kitchen floor.  Finally admitting defeat I relented, carried him outside and set him free.  I guess the tough little guy won.

***

Yes, I was grateful to finally be “home” in Bill’s arms, but Texas was also now HOME!  I never had warm, fuzzy feelings about Killeen – or our apartment – or for the entire state of Texas for that matter.  Thoughts of “home” are supposed to evoke warm, fuzzy feelings, aren’t they?  I was, in fact, very, very homesick for Burbank, California – and for my family and my friends and my church – even my job.  But here I was, in the middle of Texas, and not feeling warm and fuzzy at all.  However, I knew that living in Killeen was temporary and that made it somewhat bearable.

BUT, isn’t everywhere temporary?  Even if you have lived your entire life in the same place, it’s still temporary – because WE are temporary.  The only thing that isn’t temporary is eternity.  Meanwhile, we live in time and wherever we live is up to God.  And because we trust in him we need to learn to be content wherever we are, because that’s where he put us and that is where home is.  In fact, HE is home.  Contentment and even joy are a choice.

Philippians 4:11b says “…I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.”  And there is an old hymn that we used to sing, the last two lines of which says: “On land or sea, what matters where?  Where Jesus is, my joy is there.”

At 19 years old I hadn’t yet come to that realization, nor had I matured enough in my Christian life to even care.  All I knew is that I was living in a place I detested and I was not happy.  I certainly had a lot to learn…