I'll bite on the house exercise- great one Kep!

I don't remember why I was standing there, what I was waiting for. But the sunshine was warm on my cheeks, a welcome feeling in the cold autumn air in this foreign land. I could smell the neighbor baking bread, something German, something authentic, something my young taste buds couldn't yet appreciate. The building we lived in looked to be blue from the ground up to about four feet- but it wasn't paint. It was tiny little pieces of glass in an infinity of shades of blue. Like glitter, but bigger. I stood there, picking at them. My nail could easily dig one loose, I'd turn it around in my hand and then watch as it fell to the ground near my shoes. It was neat- this old apartment building in this old town. The language was beautiful, boisterous- the German neighbors could be heard chatting late into the evening. I must have been the age my son is now, barely seven. It was just one of the countless places I would live in my life, but I never minded the moving. I heard my mothers voice calling me to come inside, and as I ascend the few steps and enter the apartment, I can look down the hall and see that I am home.

Inside the building that had been dipped in blue glitter, in our apartment, hung a tapestry acquired by my mother in the East before I was born. It is of a lion and a lioness, looking into the distance past a watering hole, perhaps watching their young. It's coloring is beautiful in a palacial sort of way- old deep blues and magenta and gold. It would occur to me years later that of all the things my mom could leave me, I wanted that tapestry. Wherever we moved, wherever we rested our heads for more than month or two, that tapestry was hung on a prominent wall. It's what made Bonn, Vogelweh, Robins Air Force Base, two apartments in Gaeta, Italy, and two houses in New Mexico feel like home. It endured my childhood, my teenage years, and my flight from the nest. And now it is hung in the home that welcomes my children, and like me, that tapestry will be part of the earliest memories they have of feeling at home.