My Last Minute Trip, Part 1

You might wonder what would posses a gal to hop on a military space available flight with three kids and sit in a military terminal in Germany for the better part of two days waiting for a flight to the US east coast. The answer is quite simple: 2 months without my hubby.

My birthday and a 3 day weekend seemed like a good excuse to endure long lines, walk miles and miles (total, not all at once!) and spend what seemed like an eternity wondering if I'd have to spend my birthday wandering on foot around Ramstein Air Base if I didn't get a flight. We got directly on a flight from England, but had to spend the night in Germany, which was actually kind of nice because we had been stationed nearby for 5 years so I knew Ramstein pretty well. It was a bit like a quick visit home-- only without all the family and friends and fun and comforts of home and transportation at the ready.

God provided free transportation to and from the hotel, and a room on base rather than at a base that would have required me to pay a taxi for a ride. We walked about a mile for dinner at Chili's (a welcome piece of America in the midst of schnitzel-eating Germany), and had the leftovers for breakfast. The next morning we sat around the terminal and eventually got a ride to McGuire AFB in New Jersey. After a 9 hour flight and 2 hours of sleep, we landed on American soil.

In the meantime Tim was attempting to make the 3 hour trip from Maryland to New Jersey. Attempting. Our "new" van overheated in Delaware and he was delayed by nearly 3 hours. By the time he arrived I had slept 2 hours in 36 and had never been happier to be wrapped in the arms of my husband. It was all worth it.

I love It When This Happens

We buy Danish eggs. Obviously the military has some deal going with the Danish because we also bought them at the commissary in Germany. It took some getting used to because, unlike American eggs, they are stamped, thin-shelled and have chicken poo on them. But we've adjusted now and are happy as clams to not have to use the tiny British eggs.

Usually the eggs are white. Rarely the whole dozen will be brown. Occasionally I will come across a dozen that has a single tan egg in it. Last time I bought eggs I managed to find two cartons with only one tan egg apiece in each one. I call them my lucky dozens, and snagging two of them is unimaginably lucky.

Not that I believe in luck, 'cause I don't. But it is beautifully quirky, don't you think?!

And speaking of beautifully quirky, what color do you think my hair is today? I've changed my hair yet again, as only a Reese can do...

You Gotta Love Technology at a Time Like This

Sean is in JROTC and must wear his uniform once a week for inspection. Today he needed to wear his coat and tie. Because he's always seen moms and wives on tv tying ties (often better than the man), he assumed I could do it. I can't. When he had mere minutes until he needed to walk to walk out the door, I suggested he run over to his friend's house and ask his dad to help. He had a different idea: YouTube. And it worked!



And just for fun (because I clicked on this video and couldn't stop laughing) check out this guy calming tying his tie while auto accidents and emergency vehicles create mayhem all around him.

Tim Checks In With a Report After Attending the 9/11 Memorial at the Pentagon...

I received this message from Tim just after the Pentagon 9/11 memorial service:

Well, it's midnight and I just got back about 20 min ago. It was incredible. Very solemn; a very humbling & at times emotionally wrenching experience. I wish I had you there with me. I got there late so I missed the Navy band's performance, but there were still a ton of people there. In a way, it was as if I was given the opportunity to go back in time to right after the attacks happened and was able to witness the heartache of the victim's families firsthand. There were many of them gathered at their loved one's personal memorial, some sharing stories of the life they once had, and some just sitting there collapsed upon the memorial, crying their eyes out. I saw one lady sitting quietly, all alone in front a memorial with just the most heartbreaking expression on her face, as she just stared at the name plate of her... son? husband? brother?

I think the hardest part was toward the end of my time there when I was exiting the memorial area. At the entrance to the field of 184 memorial units, stands the first unit which is dedicated to the youngest victim, a three-year-old little girl named Dana Falkenberg. There is a plate listing her Mom, Dad and older sister and showing the locations of their memorial units. They all died together; they were on board American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon. It was pretty hard to hold back the tears. Especially when I looked around and a good half of the people around you have tears in their eyes. I'm sure there were perfect strangers hugging each other tonight.

The one thing that was foremost on my mind, was the fact that if these people and the other NYTC victims hadn't died that day, I most likely wouldn't be here tonight, or in the Air Force at all. It is strange how the lives and deaths of others can effect so many people who didn't even know them personally, even change the course of their lives.

I hate it when I hear people say, "Oh, who wants to remember that day anymore" or "We shouldn't think about that day & all those people who died". I think I agree more with the words carved on the Memorial Gateway Stone, "We will never forget" & "These lives will never be forgotten". That's the reason we built this memorial, to honor their lives and their sacrifice and to honor the families they left behind.

Random Observations on Separation

I've started wearing a watch. I always do when Tim leaves. When he's here I chart my days by his movements: I know when to start breakfast by when he gets up, I allow Zach to play video games only after Tim's left for work, dinner is cooking an hour before Tim arrives home. When we're out together, I ask the ever-watch-wearing Tim what time it is. When he's gone, I'm lost in time. So I wear a watch.

I don't like wearing a watch.

~~~

You know how you can still feel a person's presence after they've left you? How you drop a friend off and you still sense them as you drive away? That might be the hardest part of saying good-bye to Tim. After he left, the air in the van was still imprinted with his silhouette. At home, he's slept on his side of the bed so many times that his aura was left for days before the molecules forgot what it felt like to surround him. His imprint is everywhere- in every room of the house, on his pillow, on his chair at the kitchen table. It's both a blessing and a curse as the air closes in around the spaces it kept for him; it's easier to go about the day without the acute pain of missing him but sad how space forgets a person used to inhabit it. I think that's what ghosts are, the random remembrance of time and space of who they used to surround and caress.

~~~

Last week at church, my arm brushed Tim's and I cried as I realized that it was the last time I'd stand with him at church for awhile. I value worshiping together. Our spiritual lives are the completion of our physical ones, and joining with my soulmate in intimate communion with God is an honor and deeply moving. Yesterday, I worshiped without him. It is true that when everything else falls away, we are left exposed before God and he covers us. He is the husband to the husbandless and the father to the fatherless. He is all I need.

Separation.... Again.

It's become somewhat of a tradition that when Tim leaves for an extended amount of time I will write sappy and self-pitying pieces and post them on our blog. This time, though, I just needed to disappear for a bit. I did spend a cumulative 5 hours feeling sorry for myself (in the 3 days since he's left), but I think I'm done with that now. I think I'm ready to resume my "normal" life.

Since I purposefully neglected to write on the most emotional days following the separation, I don't have anything mushy and sentimental so I've decided to repost what I wrote when Tim left for Kuwait last year (originally posted here). I'm also adding the song that best reflects my feelings when Tim leaves. The fact that it isn't making me cry right now is solid proof that I'm emotionally stable at the moment. Yay! I plan to stay that way, and look forward to Tim's return after awhile.

On Marriage and the Hole in My Heart:

The dull ache started last week, every time I thought of Tim leaving. Twenty-four hours before he left it became a deep sadness, the deepest I've ever known. By the time we had only four hours together it was a desperate sadness- thick and mucky and lonely. I felt compelled to tell him how much I loved him, how he was a part of me and I wouldn't be whole until he came back. I felt the tearing- him from me- in my heart. The gray clouds, wind, and driving rain matched my mood as I left the place where he boarded a bus that took him out of my life until the fall.

We've had a turbulent marriage. The early years were the worst, the middle years contained a prolonged separation and near divorce, these last years have been the easiest as we have gained a small level of maturity and experience that likely came from joining the military and moving across the world. We've come to rely on each other as partners and friends as never before. By the grace of God, we've survived storms that would sink most couples. To God be the glory for this. It's despite our weakness that we still stand as a couple and a family.

This image comes to my mind: when back home last month I picked up a Nifty Knitter, a funky little device that allows Kristine and I to knit hats and scarves and various other things with ease. (Nifty, eh?!) I made a hat for Kristine, using 2 threads of yarn, one a pretty multicolor thread in maroon/gray/ivory, the other a soft, fluffy sage green color. Using them both at the same time made the hat stronger, thicker and more sturdy. In creating it, I tied, twisted, stretched and manipulated the yarns- in the end I constructed a hat with what might have seemed like a hardship from the yarn's perspective.

God joined Tim and I together, allowing us to be twisted and tugged with our own sinfulness and by the natural afflictions of life. At one point we rebelled against the discomfort of it all, separating and unraveling our life together. All along I heard God's voice in my spirit: "You and Tim were meant for each other." After a time we renewed our vows- renewed our commitment to being woven and spun into a couple again. Now, looking back over the past few years, I can see the project taking shape. I see the ways I've become like him, the ways he's more like me, the similar interests and the ease with which we carry on conversations when given a moment to do so. I feel a bond with him that words can't adequately describe. I know I wasn't remiss in following God back to the loom of "Tim and Reese." In these hours since Tim left, the predominant feeling I have is one of incompleteness.

And it's not like we have attained some awesome level of marital maturity. We still fight and have misunderstandings, and there were times in the past few months I thought to myself, "I can't wait for him to leave!" (I'm sure he thought, "I can't wait to get away from this lady!") But when enduring a prolonged absence from one another, especially in the face of the dangers of war, all the crap falls away and it's just us. Suddenly the little things don't matter. The petty stuff seems so... petty. Larger, more important things loom ahead. Like love. Commitment. Family.

That's my encouragement to those of you reading this who are married: cherish the good, consciously discount the bad, and keep with it. Most of the time the bad really is trivial. Resist the natural urge to magnify the faults of your spouse and to look over the strengths. Cherish the one God put in your life. The gift of companionship and love is precious and worth every effort you put into it.

Unexpected Pain

I've only just arrived here at our new base in England, but the thought of friendship is already on my mind. Leaving Germany was more painful than I expected for reasons I hadn't anticipated.

See, when we moved to Germany after Tim got stationed at Spangdahlem AB, I had a positive view of settling in and making friends. In the short few months we had been at Keesler AFB in Mississippi I had made a good friend and I didn't anticipate things being any different at a new base. But it didn't take long for me to change my mind. With people leaving all the time, the social landscape was always changing and it unnerved me. In the five years I was there, I would meet people that I really liked and hit it off with, just to be told that they only had a few days/weeks/months until they moved. A few stayed a year or two, but everyone, even the chaplains who held our base church service together, moved on. I decided that wasn't the life for me. I withdrew, with the very conscious intention of not making friends.

Along the way, I made friends anyway. Jasmine became my closest friend at Spang, and there were numerous others that were friends though not close ones. When these friends that I strove to remain distant from left, I would often make a point of not being around when they said good-bye. That was my way of reinforcing my inner feeling that I didn't care. If I didn't invest anything, there was no way to get hurt.

Wrong.

It turns out, now that it was my turn to say good-bye, that the one person I loved there, Jasmine, made my leaving sweet. It hurts to part from friends, but the parting is also a comfort because the fact that there is pain means there is love and it's being loved that makes us matter. I cried to leave Jasmine, and she cried when I left. That doesn't hurt me so much now, but it does touch my heart and fill me with good feelings and the glow of warm memories.

The pain I feel concerning people at Spang is from those who didn't care that I left. That's the way I wanted it, and now that decision hurts me more than the loss of loved friends would have hurt me. While an acquaintance meant something to me, in my rather lonely and lowly life in Germany, I meant nothing to them. I was a blip on their radar screen, but they were all I knew as friends in those years (besides Jasmine). There are several people from church (that I would have considered to be distant friends) who didn't bother to say good-bye, even though they knew it was my last Sunday and they were at church too. That hurts. And I take blame for it.

I've learned my lesson. The pain of not being cared about, in retrospect, isn't worth the saved "pain" of parting with a beloved friend. A full life is one lived without all the boundaries we tend to put up to protect ourselves. I refuse to live like that again.

Prayer Request

If you think about us this coming week, please pray that our visas come through lightning fast. We've only just been able to apply for them and we have less than a week until we're scheduled to leave and we must have them to enter the UK. We traveled to Düsseldorf yesterday to apply and we were told it can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. While our applications are in the hands of the British consulate now, in a very real way they are in the hands of God and I am putting faith in Him during this process. I am praying that Tim doesn't have to go on to England without us, as it would be a financial, physical and emotional strain on us all.

Your thoughts and prayers are appreciated!

Moving On

“Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine.”

~Robert C Gallagher

Well, it's done. We're out of our beloved house for good, and in base lodging for the next week. By the piles of stuff still needing to be sorted through and taken to recycling/Airmen's Attic/secondhand shop, it's apparent that we're far from ready to leave here. Yes, the STUFF is in our hotel. Thankfully, this is the largest and most accommodating lodging facility we've ever seen; it's a converted 3 bedroom apartment with a study. There's plenty of room here for a family of six and a mountainous pile of crap.

We went to our chapel service for the last time tonight. It was bittersweet. It feels like it's time to move on, yet there are relationships we've developed with people that I wish didn't have to end. Military life, with all it's rewards, is a tough life on some levels.

Thanks, Heather, for keeping up with the posting. I'll try to check in again soon, though tomorrow I may be away from the computer again. We're moving onto the new challenge of trying to secure our visas before it's time to leave.