Hey everyone it's a beautiful winter day. I'm out hiking and I thought it was a good day for a trail talk because there's something that I've been thinking about and that is home home

You know it we take for granted, I think, what home is, what it means.

For those of us who didn't grow up in a good home, which is a shame, we kind of have an idea in our minds of what we want home to look like and usually it's

influenced by other people's homes or homes we've seen on television or somewhere else.

And since the death of my grandfather I've been thinking a lot more about this because I realize

more than I think I ever have how much I want to pass down a legacy to my children so that they

know who they are and I think because my wife's

pregnant now too that the culmination of both of those things have me thinking

about this and it's also so they know who their grandfather is and who their grandmother was and their great

grandfather and people that they're not going to know.

I want them to have something that tells them who this person was because they meant a lot in my life, in my wife's life, and they helped shape who we are.

And so it gives them a grounding I believe and it's a hard thing when one

generation passes away and a new generation rises up because you feel like you've

lost something like there's you know like I know my grandfather I had experience

with him but my kids will never have that same experience they only have the stories

that I can tell them and that my father can tell them they only have videos that

I've taken and things I've written down and

and it's not the same obviously. And so, you know, what is that yearning? Why do we

want to do that? Why is it that I want to go to the old places not just show them and talk about who he was but I want to show them the places where he lived and things he accomplished what is that yearning

And so I've been thinking about that a little bit and you know I think in the West especially and it's probably not unique to the West or unique to the United States, but that symbol of the family farm has been for generations an important icon of what home means, what true home means.

And a lot of the Hallmark movies, I don't really watch a lot of Hallmark,

but I see enough of the advertisements and stuff to know.

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