Home Again
                             by Homer Pheeder 
                             
Having spent most of the summer on an extended vacation touring fishing
villages along the western coast of Oregon, I was not thrilled over the
return to civilization. But once we were home, Effie and I began unpacking
the old pickup, dumping the debris that had collected in the bottom of the
ice chest for the cats to savor, lugging the suitcases we had stacked behind
the driver's seat and finally collecting the mail which had accumulated
while we were gone.

The old house hasn't changed much, although I do note the remains of some
firecrackers out by the front gate, which means that the neighbor's kids
probably have been by on their annual tour of terror on the Fourth of July.

We immediately discover the things in our haste we forgot to remove from the
refrigerator before we left. There is the sour milk which has danced itself
into a fine frenzy in our absence, and the tuna salad that gives new meaning
to the words hazardous waste. These are things that the omnipresent eyes of
science should examine, I think, tossing the tuna salad in the compost pile
and the sour milk to the cats.

The mail is an entirely different story. Our neighbors made it a point, in
our absence, to collect the mail every few days, depositing it out by the
old milk churn in the barn. Although this charitable act guarantees that
things of insurmountable importance, like my copies of The Seed Planter,
were awaiting my return, it also means that we would be forced to wade
through a pile of garbage mail the size of the national debt.

Finally when the disasters, either real or imagined, have been dealt with,
and Effie is sitting once more in her chair, I in mine, with the windows all
wide open to one of the prettiest fall evenings anyone could ever desire, we
dive into the pile of mail that lay on the floor between us.

There were two copies of Knitters World, which Effie grabs with a smile on
her face, and of course The Farmer's Empire and The Seed Planter which go on
my pile. In the space of half an hour, we are done. There is a small pile of
bills sitting on the end table, the letters from relatives, our individual
stack of circulars and the junk mail which lays between us on the floor in a
rumpled pile.

We have driven over a thousand miles, been hosted by a legion of folks that
we probably will never see again, and wore at least two normal years' rubber
off the tires on the old pickup. We have been on a search for peace and
tranquility on the beaches of Oregon and Washington.

We had thought to find, hidden among the spume and waves, something we
didn't feel we had here at home.

Now, with the sounds of the evening settling down around the house like a
fluffy goose down comforter, the neighbors drive by, and cheerfully beep
their horn to welcome us back. The sense of tranquility and peace, that we
traveled thousands of miles to find, and that had eluded us, suddenly was
there, as if we, and it, had never left our home.