"When dawn spreads its paintbrush on the plain, spilling purple... ," Sons of the Pioneers theme for TV show "Wagon Train." Dawn on the mythic Santa Fe Trail, New Mexico, looking toward Raton from Cimarron. -- Clarkphoto. A curmudgeon artist's musings melding metaphors and journalism, for readers in more than 150 countries.

Monday, December 19, 2016

Six days til Christmas - homestead

Homestead, watercolor
Six days til Christmas - "I'll be home for Christmas."
Homestead--where you grew up? Where you returned to, or yearn to? Where you remember?
Urban folks don't much use this word, but it's common in rural areas, for good reasons, especially in Oklahoma
In Old English, before 1000 A.D., it was  "hamstede"-- "home, town, village," from home and stead (locality). In the English colonies in the 1690s, it was "a lot of land adequate for the maintenance of a family. The  1862 Homestead Act, designed to help white Americans push further west, defined a homestead as 160 acres. The verb was first recorded in 1872.
Don't you imagine Jesus had a homestead in Nazareth, a poor little rural village?

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