Homebound
Today turns out to be the day for doing what was planned for yesterday: enjoying springtime out in the yard now that SxSW is over.
Yesterday afternoon at home was impossible. Here’s why: vanloads of possible speculative buyers touring the house across the street (and peeking into and commenting about neighboring yards); giant heavy-duty utility-pole replacement equipment on one side and crews using chainsaws to take down the old poles; open windows with screaming, whining floor-polishing equipment on another side; and nail-guns, compressors, and every kind of noisy construction equipment on a new addition on another side.
So we went out and ran errands. And today will be the cooking, baking, and yard day. We have a stack of gardening books to encourage thinking about next spring in the yard. Thank you, Sledd’s Nursery; to you we owe the flowers that return year after year. The photo, taken this morning with a toy camera, is labeled ranunculus and allium, but the neighbor who lived next door until she was close to her hundredth birthday would have called these Persian buttercups and flowering garlic.
Don’t you mean “housebound”? “Homebound” implies that you are returning home. How can you return home if you never left?
“Homeward bound” (see the Simon & Garfunkel song of the same title) or “headed toward home” are two of the American idioms related to returning home, not “homebound.” In common American usage “home” and “house” are generally equivalent, although English-speakers in other parts of the world do not always consider them to be such and sniff at the notion of synonymy, reserving “house” for the structure only and “home” for notions of domesticity. “Homebound” and “housebound” are the same. You might enjoy the John Greenleaf Whittier poem “Snow-bound” if you are not familiar with it.