This story, though fiction, draws on details of the author’s long life and his intimate experiences from his careers as salesman, teacher, small-church pastor, and landlord. Names of characters and settings have been changed to protect the innocent, but what it meant to them to be “at home” was taken as real.

What “home” means may be persistent or temporary but, in either case, will have impact on who the self is and who one understands “self” to be. That was certainly the case with Bill Trenton, at least, and how he related to those he came to know. How one changes may be affected by circumstance and opportunity and by changes in others and may bring happiness or pain or both. How it is encountered may affect one’s content or discontent, hopes or sense of failure, one’s life agenda, one’s impact on others, one’s certainties or confusions, even one’s sense of what an eternal home may be, and—finally—what one hopes home to mean and what then to do.