poetry and prose

Write about your dream home.

When my children’s father committed suicide three years ago, all I could focus on was buying a house. We needed a home—no more renting and barely settling down before moving to the next place. I craved a place where we could heal together.

Three months after he passed, we left the Santa Cruz mountains and came back to my roots — the Central Valley.

I was blessed to receive social security benefits and enough of a lump sum leftover from our divorce to put as a down payment for our first home.

No more small, shared places, no dilapidated shacks or feeling like I was never going to make it.

Money stopped becoming such a stressor, and life began to improve. Living in the Santa Cruz mountains, I felt like I’d never get ahead. In the Valley, though, I was able to buy a beautiful home in the nicest neighborhood I could find. That was where the “rich people lived” when I was growing up, and now here I am.

Our home isn’t “wealthy” .. more upper middle class. It has a beautiful green lawn, with a tree looking over the yard. My husband and I have begun collecting plants and enjoy watching them grow.

We live in a safe neighborhood where we can go for walks, runs, and bike rides. There are kids to play with and a sweet 80 year old woman named Rose who gives us cookies or lemons from her tree.

We adopted several pets.. three dogs, and three cats. We tried out some other creatures that didn’t quite work out.. frogs, fish, a rabbit.

There’s a small porch where I sit with my morning coffee.

It’s filled with the people I love most: two children who inspire me every day with their beauty, resilience, and strength, and my husband who sees me, truly KNOWS me, and values me… and he’s pretty handsome too!

The night I received the call that my exhusband had hung himself was filled with tremendous pain. Waking my children up from their sleep to let them know their dad had died began a gut wrenching journey of explaining suicide to young children.

Excruciating pain, followed by the most beautiful gift God could have ever given me—a home bursting with love at every seam.