But I'm near the end and I just ain't got the time
And I'm wasted and I can't find my way home.

I’ve always loved those lyrics, but I must admit that I don’t remember ever being so wasted that I couldn’t find my way home. Yet that image of not finding ones way home remains with me. It sometimes shows up in my dreams.

The setting was some sort of mashup of Brooklyn, where I lived when I first got out of college and some aspects of a science fictional Japan. I wander past shops, try to find a subway line that goes the right way, follow avenues and look up streets, but everything seems to take me east instead of north.

This dream recurred the other night in a sleep made light by a crick in the neck. I woke up grumpy from lack of sleep and pondering what this means.

I’ve been receiving more emails about the old house. It sounds like the foreclosure is pretty much complete. We’ve moved to a nice small house that we are renting, and the kids have been spared most of the trauma of the move and foreclosure, yet I suspect that this may have fed into my dream. The house that had been my home for fifteen years is now no longer mine.

Yet it is also Mother’s Day, which is another aspect of what makes a house a home. Memory laden objects have been brought from the old house to the new house and Kim has done a great job in turning this house into a home.

So, perhaps there is something more to this effort to find my way home. Does it have to do with my work? My career? My writing?

Yesterday morning, a wood thrush hopped around on the old mountain laurel bush outside my office. On a branch above the wind chimes, he sang his song for me. I thought of Willie in Willie was Different, a children’s book by Norman Rockwell. I grew up not far from where Rockwell painted and his paintings always evoke some sense of home for me. My mother got us a copy of the book Willie was Different which I’ve read to my children.

Is this wood thrush pointing me the way home? Is the way home paved with blog posts, chapters for books and other writings? I don’t know.

But I do know that the heart and hearth of a home is kindled by a mother. So, to Kim, to my mother, to Kim’s mother in heaven, to all the work at home, stay at home, crazy moms, Happy Mother’s Day. May you, and your loved ones find your way home.