day no. 16,676: good homes and good medicine

"Frodo was now safe in the Last Homely House east of the Sea. That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, ‘a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep, or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.’ Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear and sadness.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

A good home is good medicine. It can fill myriad prescriptions. A perfect place must be suited to differing demands. It is a place of productive activity for the laboring and rest and respite for the exhausted. It is a place to lay your head and to lift it. It can tend to the needs of the mending or the growing. It gives rest to the worker and work for the rested. It is a place of quiet and belly laughs, of sitting and standing, of silence and singing, of fasting and feasting, 

Godly parents strive to give their kids this kind of blessing and should teach their kids how to provide this gift to their children. It nourishes health and teaches how to feed. It comforts and teaches how to be a comforter. It raises and teaches how to raise others. A good home reproduces good homemakers. A good home is one that does not insist on being superior to the subsequent homes it produces. It shows those in it how to make one of their own, it cheers them on in their endeavor, and it welcomes back its former members without obligating them.

In short, a good home is simultaneously somewhere you want to be and something you want to replicate somewhere else.