I’m excited to be joining in with The Indie Exchange’s #FlashFiveFriday event. The premise is very simple: five minutes flash blogging or flash fiction based on a prompt set by The Indie Exchange each week. This week the prompt is House.

The Guidelines

#FlashFiveFriday is a weekly flash fiction/flash blogging prompt.

The rules are very simple if you’d like to take part:

1) Write for no longer than five minutes
2) No upper or lower word limits
3) You must write something new
4) You can prepare your post ahead of time but the 5 minute limit still applies
5) If you add your blog post to the weekly linky (found at The Indie Exchange) you must visit five other blogs that week too to show your support

 

#FlashFiveFriday: Home

 

#FlashFiveFriday - House

Since 2011 we’ve lived in four different houses-our condo in Newton, Massachusetts, which we’ve since sold, an apartment in Corona del Mar, in southern California, a sprawling house in the mountains in Stowe, Vermont, and our current apartment, rented from two Harvard professors on sabbatical.

Our move to Corona del Mar was a trial run; I’d always wanted to live in California and our youngest had been in LA for two years. The West Coast, largely because of the way it was settled, is a land of new beginnings. People are more hopeful, more fluid, less constrained than here in the east. I would become a new person, I thought; without the constant judgment I always feel here, I’d be the best possible me.

Only it didn’t happen. I loved being near our youngest, but I missed our other three daughters, their husbands, our grandchildren, our extended family, our friends. In Vermont, a house we rented picturing huge family gatherings, because Vermont is a place our family loves, I felt equally isolated, alone. The kids came, but they have their own lives and Vermont is nearly a four-hour drive from Massachusetts and Maine, where two of our daughters lived, and a flight from DC and LA, where the other two are.

Now we’re back in Massachusetts, renting while we wait for our daughters, in flux, to figure out where they want to live. From all the moves, the attendant anxiety, loneliness, confusion, I’ve learned one thing: home truly is where the heart is. For me, the heart is my family-my husband, children, grandchildren. When I’m with them-in California, Massachusetts, DC, or New Hampshire-I’m home.