We arrived home just before noon yesterday, and it’s great to be here. No, I’m not at my house. “Home”, as everyone here calls it, is the Quiet Valley Ranch, site of the Kerrville Folk Festival. It’s home because that’s where our family is. That’s what we’ve grown to be after camping together for eighteen days year after year. We are the Kerrverts, and we are a special breed.

For us, home is a twenty-four foot camper. My wife claims twenty-three feet of it as her own. It’s a shower room with concrete floors, but it has hot water—usually. Mostly it’s camps with interesting names like “Mix’d Nuts” and “Duct Tape” and “Tequila Mockingbird”, where the ice chests teem with cheap beer and the home-spun music radiates from the song circles day and night.

It’s not the Ritz-Carlton by any means. It’s a place where, in the words of a song by my good friend Papa Duct Tape, “we’re dusty and we’re sweaty but we’re not at work.” (More on Papa in future posts.)

It’s home, and home is not a physical structure. It’s where my heart is, with the family called Kerrverts, and oh, dear Lord, I’m one.