Mike and I were driving home on Saturday after both getting haircuts, and we passed an Ikea billboard that simply said: "Home is the most important thing in the world." And it smacked me upside the head, right then and there... an epiphany of sorts... but let me backtrack before I share what that is.

Since my Grandpa passed away earlier this month, I have had dreams almost every night of being at my grandparents' house (yeah, I guess you can tell I've been struggling with the loss of both of them since I keep talking about it here). Sometimes the dream is just that I'm there, another time the house was for sale and someone was buying it and I was trying to talk the buyer into letting me live upstairs in the house, and other times the dreams have included my grandparents there in the house. I can hardly call it a recurring dream, as the dreams are different every night, but it is definitely a recurring theme.

Seeing my grandparents while I'm asleep is always a very soothing and reassuring thing to me (it's like I get to have a nice visit with them), but the stuff about the house has left me... uneasy and upset. It's not like anything bad is happening in these dreams at all to cause the unease. When I was back for the funeral several weeks ago, I asked my Mom if they had decided what was being done with the house. She said they weren't sure yet. I also had a very touching conversation with my brother in which we admitted to each other that, because we lived in six different houses in four different cities while growing up, my grandparents house always seemed like home to both of us. It's the place we always went back to visit. To both of us, that house is home to us and always will be (even though we both have homes with our respective spouses and "home" where our parents are... if that makes sense).

I know it's just a house, really. Walls, a front door, windows, a roof... a separate garage... a semi-circular gravel driveway. But to me, it will always be home. It will always be the place I loved most, the place of my fondest childhood memories, the place I could always go back to. I realized when I passed that Ikea billboard that all of the dreams I've been having have been my way of mourning the loss of that home. I don't know why I didn't realize it sooner.

I'm having a hard time verbalizing the import of this realization and the accompanying feelings I've had about it. I suppose I have to allow myself to mourn that, in addition to mourning my grandparents. I hadn't let myself do that in my waking hours, so obviously my dreams were taking over in that regard. The truth of the matter is, I will miss the people the very most, not the place, and it's a whole lot of nostalgia and sentimentality fueling whatever I feel about that house... but I feel it nonetheless and mourn the loss of that home.

On a completely unrelated note, I was part of a collaborative kit for Scrapbookgraphics called Impressions of... Gratitude (it's the first in a series). I had great fun working with this palette... see if you can find my stuff among the preview:

It's a lovely array of goodies and it goes into the SBG store on Digital Scrapbooking Day (November 3rd). Here are some layouts my creative team has already made with it. Lilian has done two already:

(full credits here)

(full credits here)

And Robin had some fun with my Boo! Paper Pack:

(full credits here)

And Lilian made the gorgeously moody piece with the Boo! papers:

(full credits here)