Home is near the roses

Has anybody actually stopped and smelled roses before? Driving along, pulled off the road, found a park and plodded over to some happy, bright rose bushes and taken some long hard whiffs. I got my nose right up in there and just smelled away. "Glenn, look, I'm stopping to smell the roses". Well I really just smelled a little bit, jumped onto the next rose bush, than gave myself two points for stopping to smell the roses. Like when you think you're taking time out to meditate but you're actually just wondering how long you have to sit, before getting up guilt free.

We stopped and smelled the roses in a little town called Cowra. Growing up, we lived about an hour or so from Cowra, one of those places you detested going to as a kid because it wasn't your town and you usually went there having to ride in the back seat of the car next to your younger brother, complaining the whole way about him sitting two inches too close, or travelling there with your friend from school, her mum driving slower than yours, on the way to a Netball carnival in the middle of winter at 7am on a Saturday. Doing this was bad enough, let alone not missing a day of school.

Stopping here as an adult, able to make my own decisions and pass my own judgements, Cowra welcomed us with open arms. Just a quiet little town with a very bustling main street and along with the endless paddocks of sheep, it came with endless paddocks of grapes. Those grapes came with an endless supply of juice to make such an endless supply of wine.

 We could have spent a week stopping only at winery's from the Blue Mountains to Young, which was where we were headed, though with only five days left in Australia we were definitely not bound for the many winery's that whispered to us, 'this way, and stay the night in our home while we cook dinner for you and serve you endless glasses of red wine from our endless supply of grapes'. No, that was not our destination. Our home for the next four nights was supplying us with T-bone steak the size of your head, cooked on a George Foreman Grill and accompanied with four potatoes each, in mashed form and bread, of course. Thanks Nan, I love you. You're a gem.

We were only 45 minutes drive from giving my Nan a big cuddle. That means we were not very far from the place I grew up in and hold close to my heart, yet had ventured elsewhere in hopes to find something. I really don't know what it was all those years ago, but it just seemed to be in my blood, so I went happily with it. I guess when you're a teenager living in a small country town in the middle of whatever universe you're in, you really do just want to leave. To find anything, whether it's trouble or a stray dog, it's adventure right?

 Thankfully, that doesn't happen to all of us, because who would we come back to see? There are the escapees and there are the lifers. Without the lifers there would be just the postman to come back to. That tiny little town in the middle of somewhere, all alone, because not only did you leave, but the lifers that make it your home, your only home, are just lost out there, never really wandering aimlessly, because that's just not what they do. They are the one's that hold their arms open so wide for you when you come back, that you wonder why you left in the first place.