It Feels Like Home To Me

Last night, driving home from my weekly acupuncture session I had a happy revelation.  The route I take to see my {fantastic} acupuncturist is the same basic route that I've taken for various other destinations my entire 33 years.  Most significantly, this is the route my mother and I always took to get to my Gram's house.  Part of what we drive through is forest preserve with beautiful, tall 100+ year old oak trees, which for obvious reasons, are my favorite variety of tree.  In the middle of the forest preserve sits a windmill.  Not just any old windmill, but one that has been there since 1915, 3 years before my Gram was born. 

Anyway, on to my happy revelation.  This is home.  No, I don't live in the windmill.  But this drive, this park, this historical structure always has been and always will be a part of me.  For as long as I can remember, I've always wanted to live "someplace else".  I have, of course moved several times in my life, whether with my parents or on my own.  Yet somehow I've ended up right back where I started.  And I feel like this is where I'll always want to be.

As I passed the windmill last night, I marveled at the beauty of it with the sun setting and making it glow.  Thankfully I had my camera with me, so I swung into the parking lot and snapped a few pictures.

When I was a kid, and when my mom, and surely my Gram were kids, we used to go sledding down this hill.  It is quite a popular sledding spot and my husband swears that when he was a kid, some little girl that he's convinced was me ran him over with her sled.  Who knows? 

But to my disappointment, the windmill blades were rotated away from me, facing the road where it's practically impossible to get a picture of it.

If you're curious about the history of the windmill, here's a great article I found online that explains it all: how it came to rest on this spot, what it was used for prior to Colonel Fabyan purchasing and relocating it.

Fabyan Windmill