{"id":15774,"date":"2017-12-29T09:22:33","date_gmt":"2017-12-29T14:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/?p=15774"},"modified":"2025-09-25T15:40:34","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T19:40:34","slug":"home-by-psw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/?p=15774","title":{"rendered":"Home (by PSW)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary<\/strong>: Candy realizes that some things do change.\u00a0 Written for the March15th Pinecone Challenge, and expanded for inclusion here.\u00a0 Prompt\/lyrics: Thinking is the best way to travel. (Mike Pinder – Moody Blues)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: K\u00a0 \u00a0Word count<\/strong>: 640<\/p>\n

Scenes From Our Next Life Series:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like You Were<\/a>
\nYounger<\/a>
\nA Good Life<\/a>
\nTime and Change<\/a>
\nHome
\n<\/a>Warm Milk and Memories<\/a><\/p>\n

Home<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t expecting any party.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t mentioned my birthday\u2014I never do\u2014and I sure<\/em> hadn\u2019t ever told anybody named Cartwright the date.\u00a0 You do that, and you get somethin\u2019 like \u2026 well, a surprise party when you turn forty.\u00a0 How they\u2019d managed to figure it out I still have no idea (nobody\u2019s talkin\u2019), but I guess there\u2019s no stoppin\u2019 a Cartwright on a mission.<\/p>\n

Time was when I\u2019d have hated this kind of thing\u2014the crowd, the attention. \u00a0At one time, I might even have just left them all standing there.\u00a0 This, though, was not that time.\u00a0 There was a pile of food on tables in the front yard, and it looked good.\u00a0 I tipped my hat and grinned at the assembly\u2014wasn\u2019t as many as I\u2019d first feared, mostly family and the boys from the bunkhouse, but I saw Roy and Clem too, and the doc, and a few others from town including Miss Ester May Bradshaw\u2014and another cheer went up as I swung down and headed for the feast.\u00a0 Joe clapped my shoulder as I passed.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re late.\u00a0 We were about to release the hoards, guest of honor or no.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJoe,\u201d I shook my head, heaping on fried drumsticks and Hop Sing\u2019s famous mashed potatoes, \u201ca man can\u2019t be late to a party he didn\u2019t know about.\u201d<\/p>\n

He laughed, and fell in behind me. \u00a0More hands thumped me as I made my way down the table, and voices greeted me from all sides.\u00a0 I knew every single person in that yard, and it occurred to me as I looked around for a seat that this was home.<\/p>\n

This was home<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I had no plans to leave the Ponderosa again … and that didn\u2019t even bother me any.\u00a0 It was the first I realized it\u2014the first time in a long while I\u2019d even thought about my situation\u2014and it should have been momentous for me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a drifter, and I\u2019d never seen myself ending as anything else.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t, though\u2014momentous, that is.\u00a0 It was like \u2026 well, it was like when Joe tells me something that don\u2019t even need sayin\u2019 (he does that, even after I\u2019ve pointed out half a dozen times that I just ain\u2019t stupid).\u00a0 It was like somethin\u2019 that\u2019s just been<\/em> for so long it don\u2019t need thinkin\u2019 about.\u00a0 It was \u2026 well, anticlimactic.\u00a0 (I got that word from a book\u2014don\u2019t tell Joe, because I\u2019ll never hear the end of it, but it\u2019s in my saddlebags right now.\u00a0 I asked Adam not long after he came home how he\u2019d enjoyed his years away, and he told me he\u2019d decided that thinking was the best way to travel.\u00a0 Then he started shoving books at me.\u00a0 I\u2019d never been a big reader, but \u2026 turns out some of them ain\u2019t half bad.\u00a0 It also turns out he\u2019s maybe right.)<\/p>\n

I wondered briefly how long I\u2019d felt this way, and realized two things.\u00a0 One, I didn\u2019t know, and two, it wasn\u2019t important anyway.<\/p>\n

I leaned back into my chair, and waved at one of the boys I hadn\u2019t seen for a while, and ate my birthday meal, and just watched them all.\u00a0 Mr. Cartwright was tucked into a corner of the porch, probably hiding from the Widow Hawkins (who\u2019d never been known to miss a party, invited or no).\u00a0 Joe was talkin\u2019 with Roy, handin\u2019 up bits from his plate to little Maria on his shoulders.\u00a0 Hop Sing and Lina were bickering cheerfully in some combination of English, Cantonese, and Spanish over whose dessert I was gonna like best.\u00a0 Adam and Jamie were squared off in a game of horseshoes against Griff and Clem.<\/p>\n

Home.\u00a0 I\u2019d never expected it \u2026 but it seems like I drifted right into it all the same.\u00a0 I was forty, and this was family, and I was home.<\/p>\n

Next story in the Scenes From Our Next Life series:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Warm Milk and Memories<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tags:\u00a0 Birthday,\u00a0Candy Canaday,\u00a0Family<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summary: Candy realizes that some things do change.<\/p>\n

Rating: K\u00a0 \u00a0Word count: 640<\/p>\n

Scenes From Our Next Life Series, links to stories of this series included.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10468,"featured_media":15773,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"template-full-width-post.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[8,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-short-stories","category-challenges","wpcat-8-id","wpcat-40-id"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/0C6FBD97-CEF6-4738-A9EE-A0C38EC846A8.jpeg?fit=704%2C639&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10468"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonanzabrand.info\/library\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}