Linen and Twigs

Let me start this post with the most sincere and heartfelt thank you…Thank you to all the people who prayed for our state and neighboring state during hurricane Florence. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever watched unfold. What started out as a category 4 storm heading straight for our state of North Carolina and projected to go straight through the center of it turned into a slow crawling storm that kind of circled its way around our state impacting most of us with some sort of wind damage and flooding. Still with plenty of damage left behind, it could have been so much worse.

It’s funny that on a platform like this where we talk so much about home decor and making a house pretty that sometimes the focus doesn’t always seem to be on what is the most important…home.

(On a side note, taking pictures of our home just got a little easier since the tree in front of our home was blown down in the storm.)

Now to some people a house is just a house but to a lot of people, myself included, their house is much more than that. It’s their little piece of heaven. The place that they feel safe and look forward to coming back to.

It’s a place filled with tremendous love and memories. It’s a place where you gather with all the people you love most. It’s the place where your heart is…the place you call home.

Being faced with a storm that may potentially wipe out all those good things is scary and devastating but at the end of the day, it’s not really the structure that home was built on, it was the heart that built it.

I’m originally from Illinois and never even knew what a hurricane was until I moved to NC. My first memorable hurricane experience was Hurricane Fran. That is a storm I will never forget because it was a category 4 and literally went right over the top of us. I was certain that we wouldn’t survive that night. At the time, my boys were little, somewhere around 2, 4 and 6.

I remember praying to God that if He took my boys then to please take me too because I couldn’t imagine living without them. I didn’t really care about the house as much as the people inside. Luckily we were spared that night. The devastation around us was like nothing I had ever seen before but I remember feeling so blessed that we had survived but my heart broke for the people who lost so much including loved ones.

Fast forward all these years later, I was touched to see my now grown boys prepping for their own storm with their loved ones. I would have loved nothing more than to gather all three of them (and their girls) into our home like when they were little. Although they tower over me, the mama in me still feels the need to be their protector. It’s funny what love will do…It will make you wrangle chickens into your garage to keep them safe from a storm. It will make you stay a few days with your folks to get out of harms way. It will even make you travel to another state and back to pick up the one you love during a hurricane because the plane wouldn’t come here…Love makes you build a home!

Please continue to pray for those who are still recovering from the storm. It means more than you know. There is so much clean up and rebuilding to do. There are so many without power and those who have lost homes due to flooding. Most of all, please pray for those who lost loved ones in this massive storm. Those are things that can’t be replaced.

If I haven’t told you all lately…I love and thank each and every one of you who stop by my little blog. It means the world to me!