My Home In The Valley

Cristina Deutekom - Home, Sweet Home (Payne & Bishop) YouTube video

My Home In The Valley

My home in the valley is the one I have lived the longest time of my life.

It has been 35 years since we settled into our new home in the Valley and we have planned to stay in this home for the rest of our lives.

In the year of 1972, I came to the United States with my wife to start living our "American Dream" in Western New York.

For the first month or so, I kept saying to my wife that I wanted to go home, the home back in Taipei where I had lived for more than a quarter of century. I thought at that time the new home here was not my "real home"; the place I stayed in was not "my place"; the people I worked with were not "my people".

I wanted to go back and stay in my own home, live in my own place, and work with my own people.

My wife could not help but managed to encourage and persuade me to stay for a while, perhaps a year or two, to see if I would change my mind.

Then, when times went by, my thought began to change.

I had my job here, I saw the potential of my career, and more importantly, I became used to and liked as well the place and the people here.

Then, we had children, and I felt I had my real home.

In the summer of 1978, I was offered a job, which I considered to be a potentially long-term career.

We moved to this beautiful sunny valley in Northern California from the Northeast.

"Home Sweet Home"

The best time of the day for me was the time at home after work. I enjoyed having dinner with my entire family, listening to our children’s school stories and checking their home works. I also enjoyed attending my garden in my leisure time.

Then, the children were grown up and gone, establishing a family and having their own homes. The old home in the Valley has stayed. Despite the fact that the old home has become an “empty nest”, we have kept the children’s rooms almost the same as they used to be.

Every year, when the children returned with their families to the home in the Valley, they had fun sharing their childhood memories and old stuff with their children in their rooms.

Our home in the Valley is to stay as long as we stay, and we are always anticipating the home being visited by our children with their families year after year.


John Prine - My Old Kentucky Home


Yeh Tze