Forty Years

Thats how long it took
To get so ingrained.
Forty years!
Well if you are twenty,
Thats twice your age.
If you are forty
It is your whole lifetime.
Even if you are fifty or sixty,
It is still most of your life.

So its been difficult
For me to lose
What took me so long
To gain.
Because I cant go home anymore
Not like I used to.
Home was where my kids were,
All five of them.

Wherever I had been
There was always
One of more of them there
Pleased to see me.
Home meant doing things together.
Every night we read a story.
We learned to cook there,
To talk long talks,
Tease the dog,
Make a bow and
Shoot the arrows.

At home we laughed,
Swapped favourite music,
Held whoever was the baby,
Wrestled, went for walks.
We swam out to sea
With me as a tug
Pulling the others
With the dog swimming alongside.

We never had babysitters.
It was too much fun
To be with my friends
Because my kids were my friends.
And if I was away I would
Hurry home again.
So I never went out
To a bar to be diverted.
There was too much
Going on at home.

We built a boat there,
Learned to fish from it.
We watched the baby
Fall asleep with its mouth open,
Found out how
To shoot an air rifle,
Build a fire balloon
At home.

No wonder I always want to
Hurry home.
Except I keep forgetting,
My house is empty now.
I live here by myself,
And I never got the habit
Of looking elsewhere
For that warmth.
So its always a terrible shock
Just how empty this house is
Without them.

It took forty years
The old habit dies hard.

Copyright ©2005 Tony Crisp