The Yellow Ribbon Diary

My Last Post

2009-10-04T19:40:00.000-07:00

...on this blog.

I just want to say, Rochester, Minnesota, whoever you are, thank you. To my knowledge, you have appeared on every single one of my posts. I have no idea who you are. I am technically challenged; you may be a blog author that I follow and I haven't connected the dots. For a while I wondered if you were my brother's fiance, but I don't think so. In the end, I have no idea but I have enjoyed the mystery.

My new blog is called Scrivenery.

October 3rd, 2009

2009-10-03T11:19:00.000-07:00

I don't know how to blog anymore and it's really bothering me. I'm used to being able to write effortlessly and often. I don't mean effortlessly in the sense of perfection, I mean in the sense of inspiration. I normally always have something to write about, usually to describe.

A huge part of this writer's block is the perceived expectation of an audience. To admit this makes me feel silly, but it's true. I can't write because I keep thinking about how it will be received.

Another chunk is that I have finished my original story line. I began the blog to describe the deployment and now the deployment is finished. What now?

I can't seem to be able to answer the question. I figured that after time the question would be answered naturally and in a way it has. I want to write stuff that expresses my deep satisfaction with life, just the little things of life.

What stops me is my own perception of blogging; to write about the good things, or just the good things, is not interesting. After a year of being transparent on my blog about things that are deeply personal, it feels like a let down to then want to write about how having my own family has sparked a deep well of appreciation for the childhood I was given, or to write about the roast I made and how the gravy came out without lumps.

I could write about arguments with Keith, but either they are too personal to present here, or they are too minute to matter. That's another thing that complicates it for me; when he was deployed, I could easily write about my own life. Now our lives are entangled every day, in small physical routines and in overarching ways. If I write about me, I am writing also about him. He is constantly implied.

I am used to exposing myself in my own writing. I am used to the discomfort, uncertainty and the liberation that it evokes. He is not. I am constantly aware of my own responsibility in portraying my husband publicly. If I portray the best in him, then it feels as though I am short changing my audience of the other side the coin. Conversely, if I expose him in a way less than flattering than I am betraying his privacy.

That aside, the most compelling factor in my own writing is the public reaction to it. Saying this feels like a confession, I hate admitting that I care what people think about my own writing. I want to be fiercely independent, to say what I want to say and to mean what I say and to be sure of it, impervious to feedback.

But isn't being impervious to feedback imply a refusal to grow? Feedback helps chart a reality outside one's own perception. But charting that course based solely off what other people think or say is equally unhelpful. And in my writing, the pull of how others respond has become far more weighty than my own convictions or vision, and that makes me feel like a weak person.

Early on in writing this blog, I wondered about the possibility of it being published and because of that have written my blog entries less like a traditional blog and more like chapters in a book. I planned, once the deployment was finished, to close down this blog and begin the work of editing it.

I think I will go ahead with my original plan. That leaves me with out a blog, and after all this, I still like the format of blogging as an exercise tool for my writing. I am going to open a new blog for that use, and that blog will not have the comments option activated.

I still have strong mixed feelings about having a blog without comments. Am I being cowardly by not allowing feedback? That's my main question. However, the thought of simply writing is so liberating that I will risk the possibility of being cowardly. Besides, I will display an e-mail address on my new blog, so if a person feels strongly enough to want to respond to what I've written, there will be an outlet for that expression.

My other question about not enabling comments was, am I being unfriendly? A big part of blogging is the community of bloggers, the back and forth. I don't want to be unfriendly and I have deeply appreciated the community of bloggers that I have been a part of. I needed that community.

But with that community, at least for me, came this expectation of quid pro quo; that is, if I wanted comments on my blog, I would leave comments on other's blogs and vise versa. There's nothing wrong with this. And it may not be the experience of other bloggers; it just felt true for me.

This sort of back and forth commenting, with its strong positive of community and support, also requires a fairly large investment of time. It worked perfectly for me when my husband was deployed; I had the time and I needed the support. Now it no longer fits my life. I feel, in some ways guilty for pulling out of it, but I suspect this is due to my own underlying desire to please people. I'm not sure that's enough of a reason to stay in.

In fact, I am positive that it is not. I feel better already. I have yet to think of a title for my new blog. When I do, I will post one last entry in this blog with the title of the new one, in case anyone wishes to continue to read what I write.

My thanks to everyone who made this particular journey such a worthwhile one and I wish you all the best in your own.

September 23, 2009

2009-09-23T16:04:00.000-07:00

There is something about a violin concerto, especially one by Vivaldi, that perfectly encapsulates fall. All the soaring, rippling notes and the energy; I can close my eyes and see the leaves slip sliding down through the darkening air and smell the cool, damp grass.

Tonight the sunset was cream and gold above the mountaintops. It had rained during the morning and the deck still held dark pools of water, each reflecting the sky. My mums have died; I suspect I didn't water them enough, but the pansies I planted back in April survived the summer and still bloom, their inquiring faces peer over the edge of the planter.

The Larry household and I have begun what appears to be a never ending exchanged of baked goods. Larry started it when he wandered into the garage with a pile of crumbling peanut butter cookies. Several days later, I passed over the fence a plate of blueberry coconut cheesecake bars. Shortly thereafter a large piece of white cake flavored with some kind of liquor came our way.

The plate now sits on my counter, awaiting slices of banana bread, so I can properly return it. When I was baking the bread, I remembered how Mom always told me to save the paper wrapping from the stick of butter to grease the pan with. I remembered how she taught me to flour the pan, to tip it from side to side and tap until the flour dusted each side.

I remembered the round, dented tin that held the flour and how this abundance always reassured me as a child, when I would dip the measuring cup in. Flour, I knew was always leveled off with a knife. Brown sugar on the other hand, was to be packed in tightly and would fall out with a solid thump. I knew that to make pie crust, cold water should be added by the tablespoon and tossed gently with a fork to make sure it stayed tender.

Though I enjoy all the fat handled, brand new cooking utensils I work with these days, when it came to buying a set of measuring spoons, I bought the cheap tin set with a cheerful rattle. It's identical to the one I remember using with Mom. If only I could find the tin flour sifter with the wooden handle and the pastry cutter.

I thought of my father too, recently, when I finally became dissatisfied with the spring like arrangement of flowers on the kitchen table. In a fit of fall decorating, I strode into the dollar store and purchased, on pure instinct, bunch after bunch of fall leaves and jewel toned flowers. There is also a little bowl of fall gourds and leaves on the round table by the front door and a big, fat pumpkin on the front step, next to the pansies.

Today I helped Keith clean the gutters. He steadied the ladder while I scooped a year's worth of pine needle gunk out. The weather has been chilly this week, we both wore jackets and gloves. Since he's been on block leave, he's let his beard grow in and damn it, I'm going to be heart broken when he has to shave it off.

There was just something so pleasing about looking down into the upturned face of my blue eyed, red bearded husband, with his cap and his fall jacket setting off his broad shoulders. I concentrated on my work though, the gutters are clean. (Actually, it's a wonder I managed not to fall off the ladder.)

I took some pictures though. I tell you what, as soon as he retires, he's growing that beard back, pronto.

August 21st, 2009

2009-08-21T16:19:00.000-07:00

As I was getting dressed to go pick up Keith, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. I looked remarkably pale. As a matter of fact, I was having trouble breathing. Leaning both hands on the sink, I looked myself sternly in the eye.

"No passing out, Jenny!" I said, and then bent to the task of getting on my high heeled, white sandals.

Before I left, I shut all the windows and turned on the AC. I looked around at the deeply quiet, glowing house. Every surface was clean and clutter free. I could hear the sound of the clock ticking above the mantel. It was completely unbelievable to me that when I returned, I would be bringing Keith back with me.

Driving was an ordeal. I just focused on the road and remembered to breath. That worked out OK. I knew where I was going; the weekend before I'd stopped to locate the Special Events Center on my way to get the necessary groceries.

"Dear God," I kept praying, "please just make sure I can find a parking spot and then some place to sit down. I can't stand. That's all I ask. Just a parking space and somewhere to sit." I do find the strangest things to focus on when anxious.

I found a parking spot quite easily and stayed a minute in the car to collect myself. I had to remember distinctly to put the car in park before turning it off, made sure I had my cell phone and took off my sun glasses so I could see better; I was terribly afraid of tripping and falling on my face, as my legs were a little unsteady and the high heels weren't helping.

The Special Events Center was massive, high ceilings and overflowing with waves of high energy. I stood inside and got my bearings, overwhelmed at first by the crowd, the banners hung every where, the blaring music.

There was a large bouncy castle for the kids and next to it, the bleachers were mostly empty. I went up three rows and sat down on the end. I had thought I would be early, but it appears others had been there for at least an hour and the place was packed. They were showing video of the men getting off the planes and with each scene there was a loud shout of appreciation from the crowd watching.

It was a while before the men appeared and every time a stray curl of smoke escaped the double doors, the crowd went wild. It seemed surreal to me that within moments, I would see Keith. I sat very quietly, I found it impossible to make any sound. I sat with my purse on the floor, my hands demurely in my lap. All I had to do was wait a few moments and he would come in those doors; the phrase "to possess your soul in patience" occurred to me more than once during that time.

Finally, they played "American Soldier" and everyone surged to their feet, banners waving. But no troops. Each time the chorus of the song came around, the crowd shouted out, but the doors didn't open. The song ended and the moderator told us all to sit down again. We were a confused, but a very amicable group of people; we all sat back down again.

Then another song began, the doors opened and every one let out a great shout. Except me, I watched mute, electrified, as lines of soldiers marched solidly into the empty space and then turned crisply to face the front bleachers. My eyes flew from face to face but I couldn't see Keith at first.

Then, as they were talking, suddenly I saw him. He was fourth from the end, in the front row. He couldn't see me; they can't turn their heads at all when in formation and I was to the side of him. In the first moment I saw his face, I knew him. He stood out, one of the taller soldiers and his face was very composed.

It was a mercifully brief ceremony; the troops were thanked, the families were thanked, a prayer was said and then we were all released. There was a general surge forward. Keith and I had planned for me to stay on the bleachers; I had sent him a text before the troops entered, letting him know in what general direction I was in.

But when he started forward, I forgot all about the plan. I ditched my purse, I literally vaulted down from the side of the bleachers (I have been doing all that working out!), made my way over the deflated bouncy castle and then looked up and saw him just a yard away from me, looking shy and delighted. I ran the rest of the way.

He felt exactly right, every inch of his six feet two were well known to me, I curled my arms tight around his neck and just breathed in the scent of him. There is a hollow in his shoulder that fits my face perfectly, I nestled in there. He smelled good to me, which is saying something, considering he hadn't had a shower in over three days.

"You little kitten," he said tenderly, amazed. When I finally lifted my face to look at him, I immediately had to kiss him and even with my heels, I had to stand on my tip toes to reach him, my hair was loose down my back; it bothers me that way, but he likes it so I'd left it like that.

The kiss quickly became so passionate and deeply personal that eventually I remembered we were in the middle of a huge crowd and drew a little away, shy for the first time. But every time I looked at him, his face delighted me and then I had to kiss him again.

"Let's get out of here," my husband said, gripping my hand tightly. And then I remembered my purse.

When I went back for it, to my horror I discovered it gone. What were the odds, I wondered? What sad, sad person would steal a purse at such an event? And then I saw the kindly, mustachioed face of an elderly man who, with his wife, had been sitting next to me. He had my purse safely in both his hands and extended it to me, his face aglow.

"Thank you!" I cried, receiving it. I thought the world a marvelously beautiful place in that moment. If a rainbow had appeared over the high ceiling and the voice of Louis Armstrong singing "What a Wonderful World" had sounded from above, I would have taken it as a natural extension of the general environment.

We made our way through the crowd somewhat erratically, as I had to reach up to kiss him frequently; some of the way he simply put his arm around my waist, lifted me off the ground and carried me.

Outside there were tents with their bags stacked under in piles and there was a great deal of confusion over where each person's bag was. They had three huge packs to carry; I ended up carrying one of them as we made our way through the parking lot.

Someone looked at me funny, I suppose it did look a little odd. I was wearing a white dress with a full, pleated skirt and heels, with a huge, camo patterned bag over my shoulder. It didn't feel odd to me though; as any Army wife knows, we are always carrying a burdens for our husbands; usually they are invisible. To be literally carrying something was almost a relief.

I was horrified to learn that I would have to drive, as no soldier is allowed until they've been home twenty four hours. I took a deep breath and negotiated the parking lot. It didn't help my concentration any to have Keith beside me, making me laugh and otherwise distracting me.

It's a miracle that coming or going nothing adverse happened.

It's still a source of wonder to me to know that at night, he'll be beside me in bed. This despite the fact that because of it, I cannot sleep. Last night, I got up in desperation and put cotton balls in my ears to block the snores. Each evening he assures me with adorable gravity that he will not snore that night. It's very cute and completely useless.

He wakes at five and he never stops going during the day. On the first afternoon back, he mowed the back yard and got the HD up and running. We sat in it late that night, listening to the radio and talking.

I still haven't gotten used to the fact that I can touch him. He is touchable, he takes up space, he fills clothing that have hung limp from their hangers for the past nine months. The first time I saw him in jeans, boots and his pale blue shirt, the sleeves rolled up, I got a little dizzy.

He has the most deliciously long eye lashes, he gets splatters of oil on his face like freckles and his muscled forearms are covered with thick, copper hair. When we went ATV riding today, many times I buried my face in the back of his neck and felt how warm and solid his chest was under my arms; I thanked God over and over again, an almost wordless prayer that Keith had come back safe and sound.

Sound. That words means so much more to me now. He's himself, he's whole. And I get to keep him!! He's not going anywhere!

"What are you gunna do with me, woman?" he teases me often, with his little wicked grin.

"Well, they will put you back to work here in a couple days," I replied with a grin of my own.

"C'mere," he said to me, the first night he was back. "I have something for you."

He gave me a little red velvet bag that I didn't even recognize at first. I opened it and saw the little enameled pill box that I'd given him before he left. I looked up at him over my shoulder, he was standing behind me, watching me.

I opened the box, inside was a thin silver ring, a tiny crucifix, and a thin piece of rolled up paper on which I had written a Bible verse. The ring was the first piece of jewelry I had ever owned and something that I had always worn, every day for fifteen years until the day before he left for Iraq, when I had taken it off and put it in the box for him.

"I kept it with me every day, on every mission," he said quietly, bending his head to my ear.

I slipped the ring on my right hand and it was as though it had never been off.

August 14th, 2009

2009-08-14T12:26:00.000-07:00

Here's how my days go lately:

9:12am: Yay! It is officially a new day! I cross a day off the calendar and stand back to admire this incredible improvement to its design.

10:45am: Absorbed in reading the articles at realclearpolitics.com, time passes by quickly as I either cheer or boo the screen.

12:03pm: Yay! The day is half over. But no, I remember that the afternoon drags on indefinitely.

3:29pm: Listlessly wandering around the house, unable to focus on reading or cleaning or eating or any other activity. But it's almost four o'clock!! Soon it will be evening!

6:32pm: Thank goodness! Soon it will be dark and the day will be over.

8:45pm: The day is over!! Let me count the days for the zillionth time...

12:04am: It's the next day!!! Oh joy!! Now please, for the love of Pete, can I fall asleep now?

Rinse and repeat, for the past week and for several more days left to go.

People who say that the very end of deployment is one of the worst stages are absolutely right.

Oh my goodness, look at the time!! It's already 1:30pm!! Yay!!

August 10th, 2009

2009-08-10T13:01:00.001-07:00

My husband will be home next week.

(I have to pause to just let that sink in.)

I've been saying that to myself and others for the past two days. I remember so vividly right after he deployed, the very day, in fact. I was working the evening shift, gathering dirty dishes from dinner. I was in this haze of grief and disbelief. Deployment is such a large and bruising experience that it takes weeks to come to any kind of equilibrium within it.

"My husband left for Iraq this morning," I said, my head down.

I felt as though I were walking within a bubble, it was my first experience of the commonly experienced "deployment bubble," compounded not only by isolation from one's mate, but from everyone else around you, from general society, except those few who have also experienced it.

Sometimes it felt as though I were swimming through deep water. Sometimes I could hardly keep my head above the water and I would come up for brief gasps of air. Those were in the long, dark winter days when I would not get dressed, when the sun hardly came out and the dust lay heavy over all the surfaces of the house.

Now the journey is all but over. Yesterday I was gathering the menus after dinner. I stopped by the table of an elderly couple, ensconced in a table all by themselves, surrounded by windows that look out over a grassy expanse and then the stately buildings that line the street.

"How many more days?" asked the elderly man with a twinkle in his eyes.

"Next week," I replied and then just stood there, while the truth of this dawned on me. I was accutely aware of everything in that moment, the feel of the dry paper between my fingers, the carpet on which I stood, the bustle of dinner going on behind us in the main room, the evening light that slanted down outside across the grass.

These last few weeks have been anything but uneventful. My husband's truck got hit by shrapnel from a rocket (no one was hurt), our dogs got out of the backyard fence and were taken to the pound before I could get there to prevent it. The window of my husband's beloved Bronco was shattered on accident by our well meaning and good neighbor Larry as he was trimming the lawn.

But looking back, I won't remember those things clearly. What I will remember is the delicious experience of falling even more in love with my husband. It is, I cannot help but conclude, one of life's greatest joys to be in love with one's husband.

I am a realist in my attitude toward marriage; I assume that it will be challenging, that it will require work, commitment and dedication. I assume that human emotion will rise and fall as it always does.

So it is a most delightful experience to find my emotions swelling up so sweetly, without restraint. The thought of Keith himself causes me to grin with sheer happiness, the thought that he is my husband causes me to swoon. (Yes, I said swoon. It's a perfectly good word!)

I think he's become comfortable with the fact that I think him adorable.

"Cause I"m just so darn cute," he said the other day, and waited.

"Yes, you are!" I whole heartedly agreed, swooning.

"You crazy kitten," he said, with affectionate humor.

He already wrote down a detailed list of everything he will need accomplish on his first full day back in order to feel relaxed. He shared this with me so that we could be on the same page. I love that sort of thing about him, I love how organized and focused he is and I love how he then includes me, to make sure that I don't get the wrong impression.

The closer we move to the homecoming, the more jittery I become. I find myself staring off into space often, or not being able to complete a sentence. I can't sleep. Last night and the night before, I couldn't sleep until past one or two am. I am anxious about getting everything ready, I have a grocery list made, I have cleaning to do.

Today I have to go into work for a few hours and hopefully (please God!) I will sleep well tonight and then tomorrow I will wake up refreshed and focused and tackle the house.

Each day passes in the same way that entire months used to. The day begins and the first half passes by quickly and then the afternoon and evening drag by. I am usually awake in order to see the clock go past twelve am, at which point I always tell myself the next day has begun and mentally cross it off the calendar.

These days are filled with a strange, breathless energy. I know very shortly the entire fabric of my life will be up ended. I will no longer work, I will be up early. I will have trouble sleeping, not because of excitement, but because Keith will take up most of the bed and snore like a bulldozer. I won't have an entire afternoon to myself, I won't be able to have yogurt and blueberries for dinner and leave the dishes for the next morning.

The days will speed up and go by with a blur. September will come before I've had a chance to turn around. Family will come to visit and weddings will be attended and then there will be the move. Hopefully, at some point in there I will become pregnant.

I feel in some way as though I am waiting at a train station for the express to come through. Right now all is quiet. I hear the muted sounds of traffic from somewhere far from the platform, the sun falls down on the cement and the wind moves softly. However, I know that sweeping toward me with speed and intent is a huge, fast moving express train that will scoop me up and carry me away to places I've been imagining for an entire year and that will now become real.

I just keep waiting for that one moment when I suddenly recognize his face and hold my arms out toward him.

Cap and Trade: How It Will Bring Down America

2009-08-09T14:24:00.000-07:00

This is a long and I hope, easy to understand post. In it, I share information that I have come across in my own, personal research on the Cap and Trade bill. I have organized that information by addressing first the purpose of the bill, how it works and how it will affect this nation.

Naturally, in discussing the Cap and Trade bill, a look into global warming is necessitated. I have done so and shared what I learned.

Personally, the result of my research has convinved me that Cap and Trade, if passed, will fundamentally change the very nature of America and instigate devastating effects upon our economic well being. It will allow government to control, through taxes and regulation, the very energy that powers this country. It will do so by intentionally and artificially raising the costs of that energy by limiting the way in which it is produced.

Formally titled H.R. 2454 American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, its self described purpose is “to create clean energy jobs, achieve energy independence, reduce global warming pollution and transition into a clean energy economy.” http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h2454/show

It is sponsored by Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California. It narrowly passed in the House by only seven votes and now sits in a committee in the Senate, awaiting the end of August recess.

My first question was, how does the bill work?

“Waxman-Markey is an energy tax of historic proportions. Called "cap and trade" by its supporters, the bill would limit man-made greenhouse gas emissions by instituting a declining cap on allowable emissions. Electricity producers, petroleum refiners, and natural gas distributors would have to obtain permits, called "allowances," from the federal government for every ton of CO2 emissions they produce.
“Since the government issues fewer allowances in each subsequent year, the allowance price has to rise to meet demand. That is, the cost of an allowance is a tax, and the tax rises each year. As with any tax, it will ultimately be passed on to consumers in the form of higher energy and product prices. The total value of the allowances (the tax revenue) would be hundreds of billions of dollars per year “and will have an aggregate value of $5.7 trillion by 2035. This makes Waxman-Markey one of the largest new taxes in history, if not the largest.”
-David Kreutzer, August 6 2009, The Heritage Foundation, "Heritage Analysis of Waxman-Markey Hits Where Others Miss"

Or, in the words of environmentalists:

“Jump-starting a transition to a clean-energy economy means, above all else, putting a price on climate-warming emissions: no more free dumping. The way to make polluters pay, while guaranteeing that we’ll meet emissions-reduction goals, is to implement a system called “cap and trade.” Cap and trade commits a region to responsible limits on global warming emissions; gradually ratchets down those limits over time; and harnesses the power of the marketplace to reduce emissions as smoothly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible.”
-The World Changing Team, September 21 2008, Cap and Trade 101

The CBO, or the Congressional Budget Office gave out an estimate of how much these costs would be.

“The cost per household would amount to an estimated $175 in 2020. (These numbers include the cost of compliance with a cap-and-trade program, but not the benefits that might come from reducing carbon emissions — so it’s hard to compare these numbers to the cost households would bear in the total absence of efforts to combat climate change.)
-Catherine Rampell, June 24 2009, The New York Times, "How Much Cap And Trade Bill Would Cost Families."

However, many other calculations have put the cost of Cap and Trade at much higher levels. Remember, in order for it to work, it must artificially raise the cost of energy. This bill is in no way about saving the consumer money, it is about purposefully driving the costs up though government control of energy production.

The more I learned about Cap and Trade, the more amazed I was that people were even talking about the costs being reasonable. If the costs were reasonable, it would undermine the very mechanism by which the bill must work.

“EIA's independent conclusion confirms what the opponents of the cap-and-trade bill have been saying all along—that the regulatory approach backed by the Obama White House will lead to higher energy prices for the American consumer, making it a tax on American family energy use.
“So the secret is out. The fig leaf has fallen. The real point of the cap-and-trade bill is to reduce the production of greenhouse gases by driving up the price of energy. The savings in emissions will come not from new, breakthrough technologies like solar and wind and cellulosic ethanol and advanced nuclear reactors like the Bush administration pushed for, but by reducing U.S. economic activity.
-http://www.usnews.com/blogs/peter-roff/2009/08/05/government-study-shows-cap-and-trade-will-raise-energy-prices.html

“The bill, according to the analysis, also would force a 22 percent increase in electricity prices by 2030, pushing the price of gasoline above $4 per gallon by 2030 and to approximately $5.50 per gallon by 2050. Without the climate bill, the EPA projects gas prices to rise to $4.50 by 2050 and expects electricity prices to increase by only four cents between now and then.”

“Contrary to the claims of many Democrats and President Obama, the EPA found that the U.S. economy will not be a clean energy economy under cap-and-trade and will still primarily rely on fossil fuels for both current and new electricity production.
-http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=48552 (Italics added)

So, not only will this drive up the cost of energy, according to the EPA it will not in fact achieve the very thing it was created for, the movement away from a reliance on fossil fuels. We will still be using fossil fuels, they will simply cost incredibly more than they ought to if left free of government control.

The implications of these raised costs are vast. They stretch from the production and cost of food to the way America operates in the global economy. All of these effects will be negative.

The bill would cause the production of fertilizer to become much more costly than it is now, raising the costs on the production of food.

“…this miracle depends upon the availability of cheap fertilizer and pesticides, which in turn require carbon-based process energy to produce. If you tax carbon, you tax fertilizer and pesticides. If you tax these things, you tax food, and by no small amount. A $15/ton CO2 tax would increase fertilizer production costs directly by about $60/ton, with the cap-and-trade bill’s increased transport costs inflating the burden still more.

“To get a sense of what it would mean for farmers to abandon fertilizer, it is only necessary to go to the supermarket and compare the price of the “organic” produce, grown without chemical fertilizer, to the regular produce, which, while just as nutritious, typically costs less than half as much. It is one thing for wealthy organic food buffs to voluntarily pay such high prices for their food — that is their right. But to impose such costs for basic groceries on everyone else, and particularly the poor, as part of a largely symbolic effort to try to change the weather, is self-indulgent in the extreme.”
- http://www.rollcall.com/news/36393-1.html?page=2

It will send American jobs overseas, since companies will no longer be able to afford the costs of production within America.

“Our analytical models are not suited to making projections beyond 2030. Nevertheless, the economic impacts of this cap-and-trade program in just the first two decades were extraordinary. The estimated aggregate losses to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), adjusted for inflation, are $4.8 trillion. By 2029 the job losses in the manufacturing sector will be nearly 3 million. This is over and above the nearly one million manufacturing job losses that most economists predict will occur even in the absence of global-warming legislation.
-http://www.heritage.org/research/energyandenvironment/tst050709b.cfm

A loss of 4.2 trillion to our GDP? How are we going to pay down the deficit, which it projected to hit 1.2 trillion later this year if we consciously decide to slow the growth of the ecomony by more than twice that number? How can we put into place legislation that will result in the loss of at least three million American jobs, when we are already looking at one of the longest and deepest recessions this country has ever experienced?

Industrial giants such as China and India who are not holding themselves accountable to such stringent energy requirements will not have to carry the costs of such a program, making themselves very attractive new grounds for what was formerly American industry.

So, not only will Americans be paying more for electricity, gas, hot water and food, but millions of them will be out of work as their jobs move overseas or simply disappear.

It will disrupt American trade in the global economy in another way as well.

“Among the least discussed flaws in the Obama-Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill that recently passed the House and is pending in the Senate is the serious damage it will inflict upon international commerce and trade. Steven Chu, President Barack Obama’s energy secretary, warned in March that “if other countries don’t impose a cost on carbon, then we will be at a disadvantage.” To compensate, the argument goes, we would impose penalties — aka “tariffs” — on products bought by Americans and produced in other countries that don’t abide by politically correct limits on carbon emissions.

“This is why the bill would undermine America’s legitimate overseas interests by authorizing carbon tariffs against products produced by our new global competitors like China and India, which refuse to participate in anti-global warming schemes. These same countries would in turn impose retaliatory tariffs on American exports that, like virtually all tariffs, would ultimately harm businesses, workers and consumers here at home.”
-http://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/Examiner-Editorial-US-cap-and-trade-bill-would-trigger-new-global-trade-war-52551537.html

In addition, the government would be in control of energy production.

Socialism is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as: “1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods”

Is there anymore effective way of controlling the production and distribution of goods than to control the very sources of energy that drive them?

The justification for this purposeful reduction of our GDP, the loss of millions of American jobs, the needless and deliberate increase in the cost of energy production which would raise the cost of electricity, hot water, food and gas, as well as the all but complete transfer of all production and distribution of goods into government control is, as the bill states, to see a reduction of global warming.

As that is the basis for this bill, it is worth taking a much closer look at global warming. In fact, considering the weight of what rests upon the assumption of global warning, I would say it is incumbent upon us to know exactly its nature and its effect, both presumed and measured.

The following was written during the summer of 1998.

“The national media have given tremendous play to the claims of Vice President Al Gore, some federal scientists, and environmental activists that the unseasonably warm temperatures of this past summer were proof positive of the arrival of dramatic and devastating global warming.

"Observed global warming remains far below the amount predicted by computer models that served as the basis for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

“And perhaps most important, the direct warming effect of carbon dioxide was overestimated. Even global warming alarmists in the scientific establishment now say that the Kyoto Protocol will have no discernible impact on global climate.

“In summary, here is how the climate has changed over the past several decades: the coldest wintertime air masses in Siberia and North America have warmed, and the only change in temperature variability has been a tendency toward reduced year-to-year variability.

“Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, recently calculated the "saved" warming, under the assumptions noted above, that would accrue if every nation met its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. According to his calculations, the earth's temperature in 2050 would be 0.07°C lower as a result. My own calculations produced a similar answer.

“A warming of 0.07°C is so small that it cannot be reliably measured by ground-based thermometers. If one assumes the more likely scenario--that warming to the year 2100 will be 1.25°C--the saved warming drops to 0.04°C over the next 50 years. The benefits of Kyoto are so minuscule as to be unmeasurable. The costs, on the other hand, are not.”
-http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/html/pa329/pa329index.html (Italics added)

The following was written in February of this year.

“However, according to data from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the rate of planetary warming that was established in the mid-1970s has been remarkably constant, varying only slightly from 0.17°C per decade.”
“It is very clear, from both the IPCC data and from satellite measurements, that there has been no net warming since 1998 (which was a record year because of a very strong El Niño warming in the tropical Pacific).
-http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9875

I found this at An Honest Climate Debate.wordpress.com.

"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that October in the US was marked by 63 record snowfalls and 115 lowest-ever temperatures.
Over the past few years, similar signs of colder than usual weather have been recorded all over the world, causing many people to question the still fashionable, but now long outdated, global warming alarmism."-http://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com/2009/01/22/facts-debunk-global-warming-alarmism/

And the following has been taken from a study supporting the Petition Project, a petition signed by over 30,000 sciencists, over 9,000 of them holding PhDs.

“World glacier length (4) and world sea level (24,25) measurements provide records of the recent cycle of recovery. Warmer temperatures diminish glaciers and cause sea level to rise because of decreased ocean water density and other factors.

"These measurements show that the trend of 7 inches per century increase in sea level and the shortening trend in average glacier length both began a century before 1940, yet 84% of total human annual hydrocarbon use occurred only after 1940. Moreover, neither of these trends has accelerated during the period between 1940 and 2007, while hydrocarbon use increased 6-fold. Sea level and glacier records are offset by about 20 years because of the delay between temperature rise and glacier and sea level change.

"If the natural trend in sea level increase continues for another two centuries as did the temperature rise in the Sargasso Sea as the Earth entered the Medieval Warm Period, sea level would be expected to rise about 1 foot between the years 2000 and 2200. Both the sea level and glacier trends – and the temperature trend that they reflect – are unrelated to hydrocarbon use. A further doubling of world hydrocarbon use would not change these trends. "

-Petition Project, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine,

If you find this hard to believe, well, I don’t blame you. The place held by global warming in our culture is both pervasive and ingrained. The idea that global warming, as it has been explained to us, is not actually taking place is a radical one. This will no doubt be the post where I gain my first troll. (That’s an angry anonymous follower, for those of you who do not blog.)

Personally, after reading the entirety of those three articles as well as others, I am very much in doubt about whether or not global warming exists on the scale that we have previously assumed.
I do feel, however, considering the effects of Cap and Trade, that it is imperative we do not simply accept the premise that without this bill we will see global climate change on a destructive and humanly preventable scale.

I myself am absolutely convinced that the Cap and Trade bill will do far more grievous and intractable damage to our country than the projected and exaggerated effects of global warming. I am as eager as anyone to see America achieve energy independence and a move toward more efficient energy technologies. I do not believe that we must shackle our econony to an over reaching government and beggar the American people in order to do so.

About Obama's Czars...

2009-08-05T14:58:00.001-07:00

...after my grocery trip, I made some delicious home made gaucamole (three avocadoes, some minced onion, the juice of one lime and minced cilantro) and sat down to eat lunch and try and learn some more about American czars. After I write this, I absolutely will get back to cleaning.

So far I have learned that Obama is not the first President to have used them, both Rebulicans and Democrats have appointed "czars." Obama by far has more than the average bear.

"Name a top issue and President Barack Obama has probably got a "czar" responsible for tackling it.

"A bank bailout czar? Herb Allison. Energy czar? Carol Browner.

"There's a drug czar, a U.S. border czar, an urban czar, a regulatory czar, a stimulus accountability czar, an Iran czar, a Middle East czar, and a czar for both Afghanistan and Pakistan, which in Washington-speak has been lumped together into a policy area called Af-Pak.

"There are upward of 20 such top officials, all with lengthy official titles but known in the media as czars, and next week there will be one more, when Obama appoints a czar for cyber-security who will be charged with improving the security of computer networks."
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE54S5U120090529

There is no way to measure how much power they really have, since that power comes from the President. There is no review of their suitability for the job, nor are the there any checks or balances to their power.

"So far, czars have been installed in at least 35 posts through presidential executive orders that require no Senate approval. No Senate review, no questions. No questions, no problems.

"The Obama administration has created a two-tiered government -- fronted by Cabinet secretaries able to withstand public scrutiny (some of them, just barely) and then managed behind the scenes by shadow secretaries with broad powers beyond congressional reach."
-Michelle Malkin, July 23 2009, The New York Times, "Czar Wars: The Phantom Menaces"

"Candidate Barack Obama criticized President Bush for trying to increase executive power. Now President Obama finds himself the target of similar criticism as his growing army of czars raises concerns and questions about his authority.

"Candidate Obama's complaints were usually about Bush excluding Congress from national security and civil liberty matters. But Republicans say his czars are shutting Congress out of health care and environmental issues."
-Wendall Goler, July 16 2009, Fox News "Obama's Army of Czars Raises Concerns About Executive Power"

"Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) became concerned enough to send a cautionary letter to Obama last week. At times, he said, past White House staffers have assumed duties that should be the responsibility of officials cleared through the Senate confirmation process. He cited President Bush's naming of homeland security czar Tom Ridge as an example."

"'They rarely testify before congressional committees and often shield the information and decision-making process behind the assertion of executive privilege," Byrd wrote of past czars and White House staffers in similar positions. At times, he said, one outcome has been to "inhibit openness and transparency, and reduce accountability.'"

"This week, he (Obama) named two women to lead his effort to overhaul the nation's healthcare system. One of them, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, was tapped to be Health and Human Services secretary. At her confirmation hearings, senators will be able to probe her views on health policy and demand detailed documentation of her credentials.

"But the other, Nancy-Ann DeParle, who was named health czar, can begin work right away, without outside review of her abilities or opinions. And whereas lawmakers can ask Sebelius for testimony in the future and control her budget, DeParle may remain largely outside the gaze of Congress."
-By Tom Hamburger and Christi Parsons March 05, 2009, Los Angeles Times, "President Obama's czar system concerns some"

Oh, and their salaries are paid through tax dollars.

So, the amount of power they wield is being debated. Some think they are harmless or even necessary considering the size of the federal government. Personally, I think that argument hilarious. Wow, so the government is so big that now we need to add more government to manage the government we already have? Awesome. No wonder our country is doing so peachy keen fine.

Others think them down right frightening. If you go back and read the entire article "Czar Wars," you will see how the author raises some significant concerns regarding the back ground of some of these czars.

Ever heard of John Holden? Neither had I. He is the President's Science Czar. Back in 1977 he coauthored a text book entitled "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment" in which he recommended forced abortions and putting sterilants in the water source to keep population size down.

Too Orwellian for you by far? I thought so too. But here's an article from Fox News, one from The Examiner, one from World Net Daily.

The book is real, he wrote the book, the only question remaining is, does he still feel that way and even if he changed his mind, do we want him as a science czar? Interesting question, since we don't know really what that means or how really he's going to accomplish his goals and we don't have any say in the matter to begin with.

Is this a terrible science fiction novel, or is this our government? This is why I feel like I've become Alice in Wonderland.

Apparently, our Congress is kind of wondering the same thing, as there is a bill proposed that would bring accountability to these czars. If we are paying them, we should know what they are doing and why, don't you think?

The bill is H.R. 3226: Czar Accountability and Reform Act of 2009. "To provide that appropriated funds may not be used to pay for any salaries or expenses of any task force, council, or similar office which is established by or at the direction of the President and headed by an individual who has been inappropriately appointed to such position (on other than an interim basis), without the advice and consent of the Senate."
-WashingtonWatch.com

If the czars are harmless and helpful, they won't mind being accommodating and accountable and all is good. I very much hope it is. But since the czars do wield power and can and do make decisions that will effect me personally, I really want to know that there is some accountability there.

The American government is based upon an elected government. How about we reform the government we have now before we add on another, unregulated layer to the mix?

"Turning to specially appointed Czars to find solutions to some of the most complex problems facing our country is problematic. These Czars occupy an exalted status in our government as part of the Executive Branch but not any agency. Unless expressly provided for by Congress, these officials are not confirmed by the Senate, yet often have power over Cabinet-level officials who are subject to confirmation. Instead of streamlining government and making it more efficient, an overreliance on Czars runs the risk of papering over problems (Regulatory Czar) while keeping the creaking structure in place.

"In the end, naming a Czar often yields a quick media hit and gives the impression of action. But Czars are generally tasked with tackling challenging issues that require a high level of commitment, perseverance, and resources. These issues are intractable for a reason: they involve tough questions, difficult trade-offs, and touch the lives of millions of Americans from all walks of life. Simply adding another layer of bureaucracy isn't going to change this fact.

"Only by reforming and managing the underlying bureaucracy can you affect long-lasting change. What we need is to make government work, rather than creating more Czars to construct a Potemkin village for the major issues facing our country."
-Tax Payers For Commen Sense

And now back to house cleaning!

August 5th, 2009

2009-08-05T09:13:00.001-07:00

I have been a really bad blogger. I can hardly keep up with even the small amount of commenting that I used to do. I've started and in some cases finished at least five blogs, but did not post them.

The problem is is that I'm caught in the crux of two extremely compelling forces. One, of course, is my husband's return. This eclipses everything else around me except for the other compelling force and that is my concern for and awareness of my country.

My days are all spent either standing still, lost in space, completely illuminated by the sheer, breathless happiness of knowing that very soon my husband will be in our home or lost on the internet as I research more and more about recent government policies, their impact on our country, how the government is structured, how it used to be structured, what is possible still to do and what is lost already.

I don't consider myself to be a controversial person. Or at least, I didn't. I am amiable and easy going, shy and withdrawn. I have an analytical and logical mind and a healthy dose of scepticism.

Consequently, the more I learn about government today the more I feel as if I have fallen down the rabbit hole. And I just keep falling. I keep wanting to blog about this, but first of all, my ideas keep evolving the more and more I learn and I think there's still a great deal more to learn. I don't want to present half baked political ideas.

However, I am curious. How many of you are aware that Congress voted against bailing out GM back in December and then the President took their authority into his own hands and took over the company without Congress? That is a breathtaking, heart stopping abuse of power. Fascinatingly, Bush did the same thing.

Furthermore, GM is right now not being managed through pre-established government bureaucracy, but through the Auto Task Force set up the President. Sound too weird and scary to be true? I feel the same way! That's why I'm not sure if I want to even blog about it, but follow these links and then do some research. See where it takes you.

http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE56G5Q420090717

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/Content/article.aspx?RsrcID=48791

I could go on and on, but I won't. I just wonder one more thing, what all do you think or know about these so called "czars"? Is this a good idea? What is their purpose? Who do they answer to? What precedent is there for them? How much authority do they have and where does it come from?

I'm still trying to figure it out myself. But I'll tell you one thing, I have very bad feeling about it. I will try to hold off drawing conclusions until I learn more about them though.

So, between that and preparing for Keith to come home, I've just been absorbed. And I promised myself that I wouldn't spend the whole day down here on the computer feeling like Alice in Wonderland. Today I'm going to clean the house and do some much needed grocery shopping. So I better head off and start, but if you don't hear from me as much, I'm still here and following right along.

July 29th, 2009

2009-07-29T08:35:00.001-07:00

I have under gone some sort of transformation in the last few days, as is pretty clear I guess, from my blogging. I woke up one day early this week and found myself to be an American. Before then I guess I was just along for the ride, caught up in feelings of apathy, helplessness and disinterest.

It came as an incredible shock to me to realize that socialized medical care could even be debated in our Congress, that we could have elected a President who could offer it as a viable option for health care reform. It caused me not only to look more into the health care situation, but also into what it means to be American.

Our country was founded with the hope that future generations would not only understand, but perpetuate their form of government, the Republic of the United States of America. But we have squandered it. I came of age as an American only to find that my country has been all but hollowed out, ironically, usually from either good intentions or from fear.

For example, take the good intention of equality in health care, the proposed result of a universal health care system.

"In the Wall Street Journal British physician Anthony Daniels writes:
"The government-run health-care system—which in the U.K. is believed to be the necessary institutional corollary to an inalienable right to health care—has pauperized the entire population.

"This is not to say that in every last case the treatment is bad: A pauper may be well or badly treated, according to the inclination, temperament and abilities of those providing the treatment. But a pauper must accept what he is given.

"Universality is closely allied as an ideal, ideologically, to that of equality. But equality is not desirable in itself. To provide everyone with the same bad quality of care would satisfy the demand for equality...In any case, the universality of government health care in pursuance of the abstract right to it in Britain has not ensured equality. After 60 years of universal health care, free at the point of usage and funded by taxation, inequalities between the richest and poorest sections of the population have not been reduced. But Britain does have the dirtiest, most broken-down hospitals in Europe."

It would be one thing, perhaps, if a universal health care system were the only viable option. Then it might be worth it to talk about how to try and make a better state run health system. But it's not the only option, it is simply the worst option. In fact, government control is what got us here in the first place; how on earth does adding more of it, in any way, shape or form, make sense?

"When the government has made a mess of medical care by increasing its market control from 10 percent to 50 percent over the last 40 years, driving up costs by shifting them to private insurers, and when state regulators have driven up the cost of the other half of care, mandating coverage that makes private insurance unnecessarily expensive, we are told that "reform" means giving government complete control of whatever is left."

Their "reform," then, amounts to more of the same poison that has been killing us."
-Richard Ralston, July 29th 2009, The Vegan Review Journal, "STALINIST 'REFORM': A public option that destroys all options."

"We need not choose between freedom and competition on one hand and long term health security on the other. Markets can deliver both.

"Getting there requires us to move in exactly the opposite direction of current regulation and most policy proposals."
-John H Cochrane, Feb 8th, 2009, The Cato Institute, "Health-Status Insurance: How Markets Can Provide Health Security"

"Rather than endorse such big-government overkill, pro-freedom members of Congress should promote a simple concept: Let every American own and control an individual health insurance policy that can be transported among jobs, self-employment, graduate school and life's other twists and turns."

"What Americans need is a thriving market in individually owned and controlled health insurance plans. When you book an airline flight, Priceline.com does not ask, "What is your group number?" You decide when and where to fly, and then buy your ticket. At least with personal travel, your boss does not fund this. The same is true for car insurance, home insurance and often life insurance. Why must Americans shop for health insurance at work, rather than online or through independent agents?"
-Deroy Murdock, July 18th, 2009, The UnionLeader.com, "Deroy Murdock: There's no U.S. health insurance crisis"

I have no idea why this matters to me so damn much. I didn't care before. I had this vague idea that the system could regulate itself, that there was nothing I could do either way, that my vote didn't matter.

The system does not regulate itself. A republic requires the informed participation of its citizens; to do nothing, to not care, was to actively participate in its degeneration. I was failing my country.

A friend on facebook asked the question on her status: Do you know the difference between a republic and a democracy?

I didn't. I didn't know the difference, to my incredible shame. It was with difficulty that I could even recall the pledge of allegiance, in which I thought vaguely the word republic might have made an appearance. It does, as children in the public school system we stood to face the flag, hands over our hearts and said the following:

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Maybe it is hopeless. There are some hours in the day when I feel certain that my country is already lost to me, as I learn more and more about how far government already extends its constitutional bounds, how far we have distorted what was originally given to us. I feel sometimes like giving up, like going back to my comfortable life of not caring. After all, how much impact can I really have anyway?

And then I read quotes like this, and I find that tears are streaming down my face.

“Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.”
-Ronald Reagan

Healthcare Reform and the Value of Human Life

2009-07-26T21:41:00.000-07:00

Prepare to be terrified. I have a copy of the actual bill being debated.

Here's the link: http://edlabor.house.gov/documents/111/pdf/publications/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdf

In case the following is too terrifying to be believed, I have summed up what it was saying and included the language and page number of the actual bill, so you can look it up if you wish. The language is very hard to understand, I am not exactly sure of what the language means or of the implications. But I am scared.

Point 1: Will the government be auditing the books of private companies?

P. 22 (C) "Such study shall examine the following: ...the financial solvency and capital reserve levels of employers that self-insure by employer size."

Point 2: Will there will be a goverment controlled committe that decides, among other things, the benefits ie. how much money the government will spend on us? Actually, this is pretty clear. There will be. Remember this, it's important.

P. 30 "There is established a private-public advisory committee which shall be a panel of medical and other experts to be known as the Health Benefits Advisory Committee to recommend covered benefits and essential, enhanced, and premium plans.

"The Health Benefits Advisory Committee shall be composed of the following 24 members, in addition to the Surgeon General: 9 members who are not Federal employees or officers and who are appointed by the President. 9 members who are not Federal employees or officers and who are appointed by the Comptroller General of the United States in a manner similar to the manner in which the Comptroller General appoints members to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission under 10 section 1805(c) of the Social Security Act. Such even number of members (not to exceed 8) who are Federal employees and officers, as the President may appoint."

Ok, so forgive me if I got this wrong but there are going to be nine not Federal employees who are appointed by the President and then nine more who are appointed by the Comptroller (by the way, what the hell is that?) in a manner similar to appointing members to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. And then eight more just straight out appointed by the President.

Gee, Mr. President, I guess that means it really will be a private/public committee! No worries about government control there!

Point 3: Is it possible that everyone, including those who are not American citizens, will be eligible for the program?

P.50 "Except as otherwise explicitly permitted by this Act and by subsequent regulations consistent with this Act, all health care and related services (including insurance coverage and public health activities) covered by this Act shall be provided without regard to personal characteristics extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services."

I looked up extraneous, by the way. It means irrelevant. So, does it anywhere say that one has to be an American citizen in order to be eligible for this program? It is just possible that our taxes will go toward the payment of medical services for those who are not even citizens of the United States? Or am I getting carried away? I don't know. You wanna chance it? If anyone find something in there that clears this point up, let me know.

Point 4: Will the government have access to my personal finances?

P57 "STANDARDS FOR FINANCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE TRANSACTIONS:...
P58 (D) "...enable the real-time (or near real time) determination of an individual’s financial responsibility at the point of service and, to the extent possible, prior to service, including whether the individual is eligible for a specific service with a specific physician at a specific facility, which may include utilization of a machine-readable health plan beneficiary identification card..."

Does this or does this not mean the government will require access to my personal finances in real time? What information will be on the health plan beneficiary identification card? Should I be terrified?

Part of me is like, of course they need to see how much much I make, how much debt I have and how much I have saved, how else will they determine how much my copay should be? (in addition to all the taxes I'll be paying into it.) Besides, they would find this out by looking up my tax records. And a card would be convenient.

The other part of me is like, dear God, grab your wheat kernel mills, wood burning stoves and run for the hills, people! No, seriously. The other part of me is thinking, I don't have to join. But wait, oh yeah, in five years I wil have to join because I won't have a choice.

Wow. I just love the freedom we have in this country.

Oh but it gets better...the government will have direct access to my bank account through electronic transfers.

P59 (C) "...enable electronic funds transfers, in order to allow automated reconciliation with the related health care payment and remittance advice..."

Point 5: Will there be no way to review the price or method of services?

P124 (f) LIMITATIONS ON REVIEW...There shall be no administrative or judicial review of a payment rate or methodology established under this section or under section 224.

By the way, that section is titled: "SEC. 223. PAYMENT RATES FOR ITEMS AND SERVICES"

No administrative or judicial review of how or how much they charge for the health care we will have to pay? That our money is providing?

There is so much more in that bill, but I was giving myself a headache.

I will close by including some quotes from Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. These are quotes from his article in the New York Times Magazine, on July 15, 2009 titled "Why We Must Ration Health Care." (Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1 )

"Governments implicitly place a dollar value on a human life when they decide how much is to be spent on health care programs and how much on other public goods that are not directed toward saving lives. The task of health care bureaucrats is then to get the best value for the resources they have been allocated. It is the familiar comparative exercise of getting the most bang for your buck."

I'm sorry, did he just say bureaucrats are going to assign a dollar value on human life?

"As a first take, we might say that the good achieved by health care is the number of lives saved. But that is too crude. The death of a teenager is a greater tragedy than the death of an 85-year-old, and this should be reflected in our priorities."

"How can we compare saving a person’s life with, say, making it possible for someone who was confined to bed to return to an active life? We can elicit people’s values on that too...we might conclude that restoring to nondisabled life two people who would otherwise be quadriplegics is equivalent in value to saving the life of one person, provided the life expectancies of all involved are similar."

Uncle Burton, care to weigh in on how much your life is worth to you? (I am in tears right now, actually.) *To my blog readers, this was addressed to my Uncle Burton, a quadriplegic and a facebook reader.

"This is the basis of the quality-adjusted life-year, or QALY, a unit designed to enable us to compare the benefits achieved by different forms of health care...If a reformed U.S. health care system explicitly accepted rationing, as I have argued it should, QALYs could play a similar role in the U.S."

"Every American will have a right to a good standard of health care, but no one will have a right to unrationed health care. Those who opt for unrationed health care will know exactly how much it costs them."

Is the really going to be the future of American medical care? Government controlling the value of human life itself? Determining who is valuable enough to have access to our pooled assets and whose life is not worth it? Who could remain naive enough to think this won't happen? It must, if the government is to manage health care, and the government most certainly wants to.

Singer is basing his argument in part on the assumption that health care is a limited resource. But it's only limited by the government restrictions that prevent it from the growth and competition of a free market economy.

Consider just the impact if hospitals and doctors displayed a spread sheet of how much their services cost? Then consumers could price compare. Price gouging (charging two hundred dollars for the plastic urinal) would no longer work.

CON laws, those laws that prevent the establishment of new health facilities without goverment approval, could be revoked, allowing for more competition within the market: that one, large hospital that previously dominated the market now competes with smaller, more efficient health facilities down the street that lists its services clearly and doesn't require a third party (either the government or a health insurance company) to determine the price. They already exist in Walmarts by the way. And look up simplecare.com, another excellent example.

How about instead of medical malpractice suits we try private contracts drawn up on an individual basis per procedure stating how much will be reimbersed upon a medical error? No error, no money. An error happens, the agreed to price is given, no haggling, no court costs. No more frivolous lawsuits.

Crazy ideas? Maybe. But so is QALY, if you ask me.

July 25, 2009

2009-07-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

I never thought I would do this. That is, talk about politics on my blog.

First of all, I am terribly afraid of being wrong and I probably will get some things wrong. Maybe I'll make a fool of myself in public by talking about things that I don't understand. It's likely.

Secondly, I'm terribly afraid of offending people and causing conflict. I hate conflict, it makes me cringe.

Thirdly, I tend to have this kind of apathy when it comes to politics.

But lately I've had to ask myself, is that the extent of my patriotism? I'm an American. This is my country. Maybe I am in some small, but real way, responsible for it.

After all, this country has been handed down to me by others who sacrificed everything for it. It's the legacy I'm going to hand down to my children and my grandchildren. My husband is willing to give his life for this country. It seems to me that the least I can do is have an informed opinion.

I found some interesting answers to all of my questions and I will provide links and sources so you can pursue your own research and see where I am getting my ideas from and then form your own.

And I've only barely touched on these issues. I needed to in order to keep this blog somewhat readable. But there is so much else going on having to do with Health Care Reform. Don't be intimidated. If I could figure out even a part of it, you can too.

Here are the four main questions I asked:

What kind of health care reform is being debated right now?

What kind of impact has this kind of health care reform had in other countries that have adopted it?

Why is it being rushed through?

Lastly, is there another option for health care reform?

I found answers to all of these questions. I will include links, quotes and sources, in fact the bulk of this blog are other people's words. Any italics included in any quotes are my own.

One: What kind of Health Reform is being debated right now?

According to the President, he is looking to:

"-Reduce long-term growth of health care costs for businesses and government

-Protect families from bankruptcy or debt because of health care costs

-Guarantee choice of doctors and health plans

-Invest in prevention and wellness

-Improve patient safety and quality of care

-Assure affordable, quality health coverage for all Americans

-Maintain coverage when you change or lose your job

-End barriers to coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions"
-The White House, Health Care, Guiding Principles.

Wow. Those are awesome goals. As responsible Americans, we all want to be able to provide this, to be able to say that our country achieved this. The debate is not about whether or not health reform is needed, but how to go about it.

Now it turns out there are three different ways of approaching health care coverage from a government wide point of view. One possibility is to have private companies only. The other is through a government program only. This is also referred to as "single payer" or universal health care program. The third option is a mix of the two, both private and government health care insurance and programs.

Surprising (at least to me) America is actually already on the third option. We have Medicare, Medicaid and SCHIP programs, in addition to private insurance companies that businesses voluntarily buy for their employees or that people buy as individuals.

What is being debated now (in part) is a "bridge" to cover people who do not qualify for the government programs already in place and yet who cannot afford to buy their own health care or do not have access to health insurance through their employer.

These government supplied health insurance agencies would be subsidized in order for them to be affordable to people who are in the "gap." When the government subsidizes something, it means that they artificially keep the price either low or high in order to have a desired effect.

The assumption with the proposed health care reform is, in part, that it would not be as expensive because it wouldn't cover the entire nation, just these "gap" citizens.

The main concern with subsidized government health insurance is that it would make it impossible for the private companies to compete. Let's say you can afford your health care insurance now, but it's pricey. If a government run health insurance became affordable at half the price with the same coverage, would you keep your private insurance?

"If a so-called public option is part of health-care reform, the Lewin Group study estimates over 100 million Americans may leave private plans for government-run health care. Any government plan will benefit from taxpayer subsidies and be able to operate at a financial loss—competing unfairly in the marketplace until private plans are driven out of business. The government plan will become so large that it will set, rather than negotiate, prices. This will inevitably lead to monopoly, with a resulting threat to the quality of our health care."
-Bobby Jindal, JULY 22, 2009, 4:20 P.M. ET, The Wall Street Journal, Opinion Journal, "How to Make Health Care Reform Bipartisan."

"A common myth is that universal government healthcare would be free or cost less than private healthcare. This belief violates several economic principles. First, the money to pay for health professionals, medicines, and facilities has to come from somewhere. If consumers don’t pay for these services directly, they will pay indirectly through higher taxes. Second, as the perceived price decreases, demand will increase. In other words, when people believe that they won’t have to pay for their healthcare, they will use more health services."
-David Thornton, July 2, 2009, The Examiner.com, The Problems with Universal Health Care

Another words, even if Health Care Reform is passed through that is not single payer, a government subsidized health care insurance program will put private companies out of business. They will do so because the private companies in no way will be able to lower their costs; they do not have access to tax payer money to make up for lost profit.

This will result in a single payer, universal health care program, or a monopoly on health care. We are all familiar with the economy principle of monopoly, right? For example, if there is only one company that can sell coffee makers, then that company does not need to rely upon consumer input to stay in business. It doesn't care if it sells crappy coffee makers, because it's either buy their coffee makers or go without coffee.

But we don't need to wait, even, for the economic consequence. The bill has assured that even if private health care companies don't die on their own, they will be no longer allowed five years after the passage of the bill.

"The (health care reform) bill clearly states that within five years of passage all employers must switch you over to a government managed health care plan. If you refuse, you’ll be fined by the Federal government. It will cost another trillion dollars (we are already $11 trillion in debt now) and still won’t cover every American."
-Carolina Politics Online, July 24 2009

"Also, within five years all Americans would be subject to the individual mandate to either purchase "qualifying coverage" or pay a fine."
-Edmund F. Haislmaier, July 23 2009, The Heritage Foundation, "Micromanaging Americans' Health Insurance: The Impact of House and Senate Bills"

(By the way, please read that article and click on the footnotes, they will will direct you to the section numbers of the bill actually being debated right now. I did it, because I didn't quite believe what I was hearing.)

But this is the government right? The government will surely provide quality services, right?

How many of you have parents or grandparents on Medicaid/Medicare? How many of you remember the government's response to Hurricane Katrina? Anybody been to the DMV lately?

How about looking at how other countries have set up their own systems.

Two: What effect has Universal or Single Payer health care systems had on other countries?

It costs way more that predicted and to see this, we don't have to look outside of our own country. The following is talking about the state of Massachusetts.

"The subsidized insurance program at the heart of the state's healthcare initiative is expected to roughly double in size and expense over the next three years - an unexpected level of growth that could cost state taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars or force the state to scale back its ambitions."
-By Alice Dembner, February 3, 2008, The Boston Globe, Subsidized Care Plan's Cost to Double

How about California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's "universal" health care plan recently died in the legislation?

"Like collapses in Illinois, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, this one crumpled because of the costs, which are always much higher than anticipated. The truth teller was state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, who thought to ask about the price tag of a major new entitlement amid what's already a $14.5 billion budget shortfall.

An independent analysis confirmed the plan would be far more expensive than proponents admitted."
-The Wall Street Journal: Opinion Journal. Editorial, January 30th, 2008 "Terminated"

Secondly, countries that have adopted universal health care systems are facing reduced benefits and rationing of services.

"Canada's Medicare program arrogantly asserts that Canadians get "medically necessary services," yet the facts show Canadians endure scandalously long wait times and a dangerous lack of access to modern diagnostic and treatment-related technologies, ultimately costing lives.

"British citizens suffer under the rule of their National Health Service, directed by their House of Commons Task Force, which recommended "techniques for determining the cost-effectiveness of new technologies" with "nationally approved standards for the commissioning of new technologies."

"Western European nations, where government dictates drug prices to the end result of pitifully reduced innovation, have less access to new cancer-curing drugs, so, consequently, patients die earlier from those diseases when compared to the U.S. There is no mystery here--it has been proved the world over that when government dictates prices on services, those services become unavailable."
-Scott W. Atlas, July 21, 2009, Forbes. com, "Rationing Health Care"

And-

"Now, however, the European welfare states are slashing benefits in the face of rising health care costs.

"A recent front-page story in the New York Times detailed the European cutbacks. According to the article, Britain, France and Germany are all being forced to limit access to care. Rationing, already extensive, is increasing."

-Michael D. Tanner, This article appeared on cato.org on September 23, 1996, A Hard Lesson on Socialized Medicine, The Cato Institute.

And-

"Great Britain's National Health Service (NHS) was created on July 5, 1948. As with all government programs, bureaucrats underestimated initial cost projections. First-year operating costs of NHS were 52 million pounds higher than original estimates1 as Britons saturated the so-called free system.Many decades of shortages, misery and suffering followed until 1989, when some market-based health care competition was reintroduced to the British citizens2."
-The Problems with Socialized Health Care

Secondly, they face incredibly long wait times for treatment.

"In Massachusetts, which mandated universal health care in 2006, patients wait an average of 63 days to get an appointment with a primary care provider. That is seven times the wait in Philadelphia or Atlanta."
-Tom Donohue, July 21, 2009 The Huffington Post, "Achieving Responsible Health Care Reform"

"My health-care prejudices crumbled not in the classroom but on the way to one. On a subzero Winnipeg morning in 1997, I cut across the hospital emergency room to shave a few minutes off my frigid commute. Swinging open the door, I stepped into a nightmare: the ER overflowed with elderly people on stretchers, waiting for admission. Some, it turned out, had waited five days. The air stank with sweat and urine. Right then, I began to reconsider everything that I thought I knew about Canadian health care."
-David Gratzer, summer 2007, City Journal, "The Ugly Truth about Canadian Health Care"

Ok, so it's clear there are some really serious and complicated issues concerning universal health care. If so, why for God's sake rush it through Congress?

Three: Why the rush?

"There are genuine reasons the public is concerned about the state of health care in the United States. Good and fair-minded citizens may agree or disagree on the most urgent priorities and means to achieve them. But a rush to enact a massive plan hardly digested by members of Congress, let alone the public, does no service to any of us."
-Christina Fadden Fitch, July 24 2009 Syracuse.come "No Need to Rush Through Health Care Reform."

And yet it is being rushed through:

"In Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) easy-to-follow opinion piece in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, he wrote that before members of Congress even had time to read the 1,000-page bill, it already had cleared two major House committees. They didn’t even know the cost. So expensive, so complex, and potentially so powerful as to forever change the role of the federal government, and yet they’ve fast-tracked it?"
-Gorden Deal, Wall Street Blogs, July 24, 2009, 7:41 AM ET Health Care Reform: Cost and Controversy

Here's one opinion why (but just one). I happen to share this opinion. I could be wrong.

"President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel has insisted that a vote on the House health care disaster will take place prior to the August recess. There is a very simple reason for this. Obama knows that Americans are opposed to this bill coming out of the House and these Congressmen are going to catch hell when they get home over the recess. The odds are better for House passage if the vote takes place before they are all confronted with their constituents."
-Caroline Politics Online, July 24 2009

However-

"The top Democrat in the Senate says health reform legislation will not be approved before the August recess. A White House fast-track approach to passing the legislation by Aug. 7 has caused divisions among Democrats, and it appears to be on the verge of failing. In the House, an uprising by conservative Democrats appears to be threatening the ability to pass the bill before the recess."
-NYSSA SmartBrief 07/24/2009, Smart Brief, Fast Track for Health Care Reform is Derailed

To sum up (because, really, they said it better than I could. And read this article, it's great. Very down to earth.)

"It’s a remarkable thing. We are in the midst of trying to redesign the largest health care system in the world, and we’re barely debating the merits of it. How many members of Congress will have read the 1,1018-page bill once they vote on it? How many Americans will understand what implications it has for their health care if it — or something like it — becomes law?"
-by EvanFalchukJD, July 18 2009, Get Better Health.com, "Rushing Healthcare Legislation Through Without Consensus"

We all agree that health care reform is badly needed. And as soon as possible. But certainly not before Congress knows what they are voting on. Certainly not before we, who will be paying for it, know what it is about; before we can learn about the implications of putting it through, what it really means.

Four: Are there other options?

The short answer is, yes. There are. Here are some, I thought, interesting starting points and I love how commen sense they are. They are easy to understand:

"...there is general agreement among Republicans and Democrats that we need health-care reform to bring costs down. This agreement can be the basis of a genuine, bipartisan reform, once the current over-reach by Mr. Obama and Mrs. Pelosi fails. Leaders of both parties can then come together behind health-care reform that stresses these seven principles:

•Consumer choice guided by transparency. We need a system where individuals choose an integrated plan that adopts the best disease-management practices, as opposed to fragmented care. Pricing and outcomes data for all tests, treatments and procedures should be posted on the Internet. Portable electronic health-care records can reduce paperwork, duplication and errors, while also empowering consumers to seek the provider that best meets their needs.

•Aligned consumer interests. Consumers should be financially invested in better health decisions through health-savings accounts, lower premiums and reduced cost sharing. If they seek care in cost-effective settings, comply with medical regimens, preventative care, and lifestyles that reduce the likelihood of chronic disease, they should share in the savings.

•Medical lawsuit reform. The practice of defensive medicine costs an estimated $100 billion-plus each year, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, which used a study by economists Daniel P. Kessler and Mark B. McClellan. No health reform is serious about reducing costs unless it reduces the costs of frivolous lawsuits.

•Insurance reform. Congress should establish simple guidelines to make policies more portable, with more coverage for pre-existing conditions. Reinsurance, high-risk pools, and other mechanisms can reduce the dangers of adverse risk selection and the incentive to avoid covering the sick. Individuals should also be able to keep insurance as they change jobs or states.

•Pooling for small businesses, the self-employed, and others. All consumers should have equal opportunity to buy the lowest-cost, highest-quality insurance available. Individuals should benefit from the economies of scale currently available to those working for large employers. They should be free to purchase their health coverage without tax penalty through their employer, church, union, etc.

•Pay for performance, not activity. Roughly 75% of health-care spending is for the care of chronic conditions such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes—and there is little coordination of this care. We can save money and improve outcomes by using integrated networks of care with rigorous, transparent outcome measures emphasizing prevention and disease management.

•Refundable tax credits. Low-income working Americans without health insurance should get help in buying private coverage through a refundable tax credit. This is preferable to building a separate, government-run health-care plan.

These steps would bring down health-care costs. They would not bankrupt our nation or increase taxes in the midst of a recession. They are achievable reforms with bipartisan consensus and public support. All they require is a willingness by the president to slow down and have an honest discussion with Americans about the real downstream consequences of his ideas. Let’s start there."
-Bobby Jindal, JULY 22, 2009, 4:20 P.M. ET, The Wall Street Journal, Opinion Journal, "How to Make Health Care Reform Bipartisan."

But I'll bet you this is not the only other idea out there. This is America, after all. We embrace diversity, are innovative and we love a challenge. We put a man on the moon, after all. We can figure this out and we don't have to borrow other countries' faulty blueprints or bankrupt our grandchildren to do so.

July 22nd, 2009

2009-07-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

Pure heaven.

And now back to cleaning the entire house.

July 21st, 2009

2009-07-21T09:49:00.001-07:00

This morning was beautiful, full of breezes and the clouds were massed up over the mountain tops, enveloping the peaks and then the slopes and all over the sky were tracings of clouds and islands of clouds and streaks of clouds and a few jet trails for good measure.

The sky is so huge that to see it all but filled with clouds was breath taking, clouds piled so high up into the sky that it makes clear the fact that the sky extends upward and upward and upward, miles up into the blue and the clouds were pushing their way up, their dark blue and grey flat bottoms facing the earth, their shadows covering the green of small hills and the bunched crowns of trees.

And over all the wind played, sweeping up over the valleys and the hills and pushing the clouds along, going and coming back and smelling sweetly of rain and grass. It was so cool against my face. I stood on a bluff and looked across the valley at the roots of the mountains, the mountains that were being consumed by clouds, and underneath the clouds were the small houses, the tidy, quiet roofs, the little glints from the windows, all small and packed up against the foothills, huddled down in the roots with the trees half pulled over them.

We walked around and around the little track of that park on the bluff, with the sun coming in and out of the clouds on the eastern edge of the sky and the wind came and wicked the sweat off our faces and limbs, took our words and sent them dancing away somewhere, it was as though we could hear the echoes of our own voices brought back to us on the wind and sometimes I spoke just for the sheer joy of having my words whisked away from me.

I didn't want to go home; I wanted to go to the cabin on the lake in Maine, where the screen door squeaks such a protest when opened and then slams so definitively closed, with a bang, and one's swimsuit hangs on the line and is still damp from the day before.

"What do you think if we have chickens?" I asked Keith last night.

"Chickens!" he groaned with an intensity that took me by surprise. "Oh hon, chickens are such a pain in the ass!"

"Well, I was thinking about having fresh eggs..."

"Oh, you want hens!" he exclaimed with relief. "Hon, chickens and hens are not the same thing."

"I thought they were all chickens! Anyway, I wasn't raised on a farm, so I wouldn't know..."

Other cute things Keith has said in e-mails lately:

"Honey, stop worrying about my heart. It is healthy and full of love for you...your very heart healthy tank commander (VHHTC). (a new acronym..you love me)"

After our silly argument and I wrote the blog about the acorn hitting my head:

"Hey Kitten, I am not angry, and if that acorn tree let one go on my kitten, then let's just say we will have fire wood for the coming winter..."

"Yes I am all yours, you lucky devil, you!!!!!! I love you, you are everything to me..."

"...and hey- everything that I put into those beans was planned, you little kitten...it's not like I get a little tipsy and just start going through the fridge wondering if things will be good.....that's just preposterous!!!!!! You love me...I love you, my little honey bunny!!!!!"

July 18th, 2009

2009-07-18T07:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had the worst scare of the entire deployment. It was strangely and terribly fascinating too, the way in which it came about.

I hadn't heard from Keith for a little over twenty four hours, which is very strange at this point in the deployment. I knew, rationally, that he must be fine and that he was simply too busy to get on the Internet or the phone.

Regardless, I couldn't help but notice how inside me, I started to change, one part of me going deep and silent, the other part of me chattering away on the surface, focused on day to day life. I wanted to document the strange way in which paranoia can creep up, so I started a blog, writing in a kind of stream of consciousness style.

As I was in the middle of writing this, I decided suddenly to search on line for news and I found some and I knew immediately why I had not been hearing from Keith. It had nothing to do with him being busy, something terrible had happened.

It was so unbelievable. I went from simply noticing my own fears to living them out. I wish I could explain or describe the way the fear increases toward the end of deployment, but I can't seem to find the words. I've actually been really proud of myself for not experiencing it as much as I had thought I would. Going into deployment, I thought that I would literally be paralyzed with fear for the last three months.

I haven't been, but when this happened, it was very, very difficult to keep telling myself that Keith was fine, that he would call soon. But I really didn't know if I would hear from him or from the CAO. Part of me was certain he was already dead. Another part of me was certain he was fine and I was being a drama queen and ridiculous; based on nothing but the numbers, he was most likely alive. Most of me was simply stunned, unable to think coherently.

The worst point came later on in the day, when I turned onto our street and saw immediately two police cars and an unfamiliar car parked at my curb. At my curb. Right behind Keith's truck. I couldn't breathe, I think I started to say, "Oh my god," over and over again. I was with a friend, she didn't know what had just hit me.

I'd been avoiding the house all day, out walking or out with my friend. I had discovered that I just couldn't stay there, I refused to stay there for them to come and find me. And when I saw the cars I thought, "Dear god, they are lying in wait for me. They called in the police to come hunt me down."

Completely irrational, but there was no room in me for rational thought at that moment. My friend pulled up and I saw that the police were all over at the neighbor's and the car at the curb was empty. I was suddenly weightless. I had to think very clearly about each and every action, how to close the car door, how to walk calmly.

When I got in the house, I found an e-mail from Keith. I was equally light headed when I saw it. It took a little while for the relief to reach me completely. Partly because he was still in danger and continues to be. He continues to run missions. Why the hell can't he sit at the base and stew like most everyone else? It's starting to drive me crazy.

The rest of the day I was trying to return to normal. I felt like an elastic that had been completely stretched out of shape. I thought about others who had gone though these experiences, only over and over and over again, during the Gulf War, or right now, in Afghanistan. The only thing I can think of is that a person must get almost permanently stretched out of shape, pulled right out of one's normal emotional center.

Keith was able to call much later that evening. He said, "Pray for the families of those men." He was grave and not like himself. I had been thinking of those families all day. Now that I knew more details, the horror of their situation overtook me.

I'll tell the truth, even if it's unflattering, I didn't want to think about them. I'd gone far enough down that path to have had just a glimpse of what they were going through and I didn't want to see any farther down. I didn't want to feel it any more. It wasn't that I didn't care, it was simply that it was too real.

Keith told me about a dream he'd had, an especially vivid and satisfying dream about our life after he gets back, he tells me he has many of them. Now I understand in a new way what it's like, to really know that we can live that kind of life because other people died for it.

I was talking to one of the residents that evening, during my shift. She was sitting in a chair across from the desk, waiting for dinner. A bunch of them were there, chatting animatedly away about their lives, laughing, comparing dates, forgetting things and joking about it. This particular lady had been twenty years old in 1947.

"You can calculate on up from there to eight one," she told me, her hand to her mouth, eyes twinkling. "And it's been a great ride! I've loved every minute of it."

It was so encouraging, and healing, to hear that. After all, she's lived through WWII. I'm determined to live my life in such a way that I can say the same thing too, when I reach that age. Now I just have to get through this last bit of the deployment.

July 15th, 2009

2009-07-15T17:43:00.000-07:00

So Keith and I just had a horrible and completely unnecessary argument and in a way, I am relieved. In another, I am feeling butt hurt and dragging my ass around work not wanting to look anyone in the eye in case I either a. cry or b. get my feelings hurt again, since I’m feeling kind of raw and if an acorn fell on me, I would be certain that the oak tree had taken a very deeply personal dislike to me.

But relieved, too, because we’ve been having it so, so good for so long. There’s only so much deeply loving, intimate and enjoyable conversations a couple can have before something's gonna give, right? It was starting to unnerve me.

I could feel Keith getting more and more tense as the end of deployment got closer. All the men, I think, are beginning to grate on one another. Most of them are not doing missions, they are in line for the phone and in line for the computer, or in line for a meal.

Strangely, Keith still in out doing missions and now also doing other things having to do with redeployment, so he’s busy and the congestion is getting to him. I just think most of them go a little stir crazy right around now.

And I was wondering when this tension was going to overflow up and into our relationship. Over and over again I could hear it creep up in Keith’s voice and each time he’d push it down. This impressed me to no end, but on the other hand, I wanted to tell him, “Just let it out.”

When Keith calls me, he is looking for a specific kind of conversation. He is looking for me to be adorably sweet, overflowing with cute anecdotes about my calm, quiet and monastic day (this being both entertaining and reassuring) and he is hoping for stories about us that he has forgotten but I have remembered, in charming detail.

In short, he is looking to be transported from the hell he is in into a cool, green oasis of love and home, and I am happy and proud to provide. Usually I can do so almost effortlessly, since I am by nature (privately) adorably sweet and giggly and generally do have calm, quiet and monastic days that I usually can recall entertainingly. After all, I am a story teller by nature.

But there are some days when I just don’t have it in me. I am tired, or distracted, or both, as I was today. Instead of amusing stories about how Abby almost got stuck when she hid under the bed during a thunderstorm and had to wiggle her way out snout first, I have boring stories about how I drove a coworker to her eye surgery appointment and then back home again.

Not only that, but instead of happily merging onto our own personal highway of future bliss, we found ourselves taking an unexpected detour into conflicting opinions regarding houses. He likes brick, I like white painted clapboard. He likes new, energy efficient houses; I like really old houses with unexpected corners and sloping floors. I like hardwood, he likes carpet.

I could go on and on and in fact, we will, for the rest of our married life. We will go on not matching up as well as we’d expected to do. Normally it doesn’t bother us. Mostly because I also like brick and old houses are charming but costly and as long as the house has a good kitchen, a wide lawn and room for a garden, I’m going to be fine with it.

And it won’t really matter anyway, because this won’t be our dream house, the one we settle into for good. There’s no reason to get into hard core housing arguments until it really, really matters and that’s a good many years away. I can store up all my angst until then, have it bubbling away like fossil fuel for a really good kick later.

I think it only mattered today because we were both just irritable. There should be a flag or something. The “I’m feeling irritable, let’s just call it quits before I blow my long burning fuse over the rhetorical question of whether or not I want electricity in the imaginary house that we will never actually live in,” flag.

Alas, having no such flag, I went on pretending my feelings weren’t hurt and he went on trying to clarify his position and neither one worked and then the conversation ground to a halt because without calling it like it was we were left with nothing more to say.

This is reality, though. This is married life; the cozy threesome. You, your beloved and the white elephant; whatever the hell it is in that moment. Usually unspoken expectations that aren’t being met, because, well, they didn’t know, it being unspoken and all. Or just the disappointment of not living up to the usual standards.

But this is when I love marriage the most. Sheer bliss makes me nervous. I like that smoky smell of burnt rubber meeting the road. It reminds me that I, the human and faulty person that I am, actually do have a faulty and human man to love and who loves me back. It’s deeply reassuring.

July 14, 2009

2009-07-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

I think I may title my blog posts by date, and then subtitle them by content if I feel like it. After all, this is a diary; I didn't mean for that merely to be the title of my blog. In my old diaries, ones that I would scribble in with pencil or those cheap blue bic pens, I would simply put the day and then start out writing.

I wanted to simply do some straight out writing, so what follows isn't in any order. I did separate it out into paragraphs, but mostly it's just steam of consciousness from today, nothing terribly important; it rambles on and then it ends abruptly, simply because I was done writing. There are many run on sentences.

I might keep on doing this for a while.

Keith was telling me last night that he wants to drive hazmat trucks when he retires from the Army and we could go together, travel all around the country together and I thought that was a good idea actually, except for the extremely hazardous material that would be like three feet away from us at all times.

But I actually put myself to sleep thinking of trucking down the highway with Keith beside me, an older Keith with less hair and most of it grey and his body heavy and solid and changing the gears and the whine of it and the racket of the engine and the road passing by under the tires and how I could stretch out on the seat and put my head on his hard thigh and sleep and watch his hands on the gear shaft and the wheel when I opened my eyes and the heat of the sun and the shadows moving constantly and the gleam of light off the windshield.

And then stopping somewhere for dinner and crawling out all stiff and the air cool and leafy green and smelling truck fumes and gasoline and fried foods and stretching while the engine makes those ticking sounds. And feeling so safe, even in that dark, heated tangle of huge, sixteen wheeler trucks, because Keith is there and I'm always safe wherever he is and happy to be there, in fact, because it throws into relief exactly how safe he can make me, the pleasure of walking through the dark like that.

We'll go to the place to eat and sit down on the grubby vinyl seats and order coffee and a BLT sandwich or an omelet or a cheeseburger with fries. Only I probably won't, because it'll be hard to keep my shape with all the sitting and I'll want to, I'll know. I'll only be in my middle to late forties. I'll still be a hot mamma.

Speaking of mama, where will our kids be? Old enough to be on their own? With grandma and grandpa, playing in the lake and coming home to hang the damp towels off the line? The mica in the sand still clinging to their skin, glistening in the sun. But the oldest will only be about fifteen, the youngest about eight.

How could we leave them all summer long? We couldn't possibly bring them with us, not all of them. I'll call them and hear their voices all excited over the phone, talking about something they found, or a trip to the dump with grampa or planting something in the garden.

And I'll miss them.

But that's just one dream, who knows what life will look like by the time we get there. I got back from the vet, Lynn behaved beautifully, she is such a clever, willing little girl. She is as slippery as a little eel and clever and fierce and prone to sudden bouts of anxiety that cause her to shiver all over.

I'm starving, I scarfed down an entire sandwich of honey ham, Swiss cheese, baby spinach leaves, onion and tomato. It was delicious and I'm ravenous all over again. I want a cheeseburger.

Thinking of driving reminds me of coming back from Indianapolis that late afternoon, driving straight into the sun and the glare, for hours and my headache throbbing, the pain having expanded beyond my skull, hazy all over my head and making the edges go soft and squinting and listening to the non stop country music, the same one or two CDs that we had listened to the entire trip.

It was making me sick to my stomach to hear the same songs over and over again and I had to put on something different or else I couldn't breathe. He found the other CD at last and it was some kind of pop rock and immediately the haze lifted, broke away and I could breathe and the road dipped down into a cool lake of shadow, thick, trimmed green on either side. How tidy the houses were in Indiana, beautifully kept lawns, little brick ranches with trimmed hedges and garden gnomes and flower boxes.

We went off the main road in search of dinner and the GPS system took us way the hell out into the flat country on this back road into a dying town. We went up and down the tiny, backwater main street, half the shops closed, dingy looking, clearly in the heart of farm country, reminiscent to both of us of our childhoods but sad because of that.

We couldn't find the restaurant. We found an Amish one down the road, with a large, empty parking lot and a low roof, a rooster glinting in the sunlight high up there and inside it was quiet and large and mostly empty, the little tables covered with vinyl table clothes, the kind with the fuzzy back, looking as though it has been varnished on top.

We sat down in the dim light with relief. Keith was there, opposite me at the table, bulky and exhausted, his shoulders slumped forward, his cap shading his eyes. His hands were curled loosely, one laid out on the table. All the muscle in his arms were at rest but looking lethal even at rest, as though the energy in them was just waiting to uncoil.

It was a buffet and we got up and took greasy pieces of home fried chicken, thigh and breast and baked beans and coleslaw and corn. They had red and green jello squares and tapioca pudding, which I love. We had big, sweating glasses of iced tea. Or I had. Keith must have had, because I don't think they served beer. Maybe he got a diet Pepsi. That seems right, I can see the dark against the ice and the bubbles rising up around them, against the glass.

When we went back out we were ready for the rest of the trip, I settled into the seat familiarly, wiggling back into the leather, stretching my legs for the pedals, making sure I could reach them easily. The truck responded to the lightest touch.

It climbed hills effortlessly. It was the most amazing thing. For mile after mile I would watch for the hills just to feel the truck eat them, run straight up them without taking a breath. It was huge and high and turned easily but needed space for wide turns because of the length and I had to calculate the turning radius, swing it wide.

Where did we sleep that night? I don't remember. I don't remember getting where we were heading. But probably Bubba's.

Not So Fast!

2009-07-13T10:13:00.000-07:00

Ok, so he did not get the spot and will be coming home in (approximately) five weeks instead of two. Any of you out there who have been or are going through this thing will know exactly how much of a gaping difference this makes in one's inner calendar.

If another civilian says to me, "Well, he'll be home soon either way," or any variation on that, I will zap them with my hidden ray gun, set to stun.

Actually, I'm doing ok; I've had two days to come to terms. And I pretty much ate my weight in junk food. That definitely helped.

"I'm going to go out and eat whatever I want!" I wrote to Keith, after I found out. "Take that, deployment!! Ha!"

It's the little things, you know?

It did help to know something, anything, for sure. We'd been waiting so long to hear confirmation that time seemed to completely stop. This was appalling to me. I would pass through several days and feel nothing, no different. I'm so close to the end now that a single day usually makes a huge impact on my perspective. To have entire days pass by and mean nothing felt like blasphemy.

So at least things are moving again and according to my original calculations, the ones I had before I hoped for better, we are actually moving right along. I actually know the approximate week that he will be home, I have marked a series of days on the calendar.

But this week? This week is dead to me. This week sleeps with the fishes for all I care. Now I'm going to go slip on my string bikini and sunbathe. Oh yeah, and later I'll try and work off an entire "family" sized bag of chips and one entire container of brownie batter ice cream. Damn, but it was good though.

Blog Fart Fridays

2009-07-10T09:11:00.000-07:00

Blog fart Fridays is being re-established by feisty, incredibly awesome Jaci over at Ravings of a Mad Housewife. She has been through a lot and still chooses to laugh. And forgive. And all sorts of stuff that takes incredible courage and faith.

But this will be a short post because I actually have no blogging ideas at all, I just wanted to support a bloggy friend.

1. I just came back from taking Abby to the vet. Holy. Crap. Ok, so let me start at the beginning. The Good Neighbor Larry called me last night and told me that a friend of theirs had noticed that Abby was carrying her ears as though she had an ear infection. This friend was a vet.

I wasn't quite sure how even a vet could diagnose an ear infection from the next yard over. I checked out Abby's ears and they seemed normal to me, but hey, better safe than sorry. Especially since Keith and Abby have this bond; they've been through a lot of painful things together and Keith loves her like a child.

He couldn't remember the name of the vet that had taken care of her before and when I called the vet on post at nine thirty in the morning on a Friday I got an answering machine. I decided not to wait around to hear back from them and made an appointment with a vet I had used before.

Abby behaved well in the car and when we showed up we were the only animals there. So far, so good. Then dog number one comes along. Abby freaks out. Like, lunging, barking, whining. Finally they sniff and she sort of calms down. Then dog number two comes in. Freak out again this time, only this time she never really settles down and then dog number three comes in, another lab.

Dear God. It is a good thing I've been working out, otherwise I might not have been able to hold her. She was barking those deep throated, ear splitting barks and I was just so embarrassed by this time that I just wanted to sink into the ground. Everyone else's dogs were behaving. I think, "This is what it's like to be a mom when one's child freaks out in the store. Stay calm."

My ears are ringing from the barks, everyone is giving me dirty looks, no one can hear the receptionist, my arms are straining, my foot is scratched.

"I'm taking her outside," I literally shout, standing up.

"Never mind, I've got a room open," shouts back the irritated receptionist.

I file away for later if one has an obnoxious dog that a room does miraculously open up in five minutes, whereas if one has a quiet, well behaved cat one sits in the waiting room for a half an hour, even though there is no one else there.

However, in the spirit of not looking the gift horse in the mouth and before Abby and I could get stoned by the angry mob, we scuttle into the room. I scuttled, I should say. Abby lunged here and there and then back again and forward and right and back and finally into the room, where I collasped into a chair and let the adrenaline slowly ease out of my body.

And of course, she doesn't have an ear infection. Awesome.

She did need her shots though, so it wasn't a complete loss. Next time, she's waiting in the car until it's her turn and then I will come get her and we're getting a harness. Lynn needed one when she was younger too.

2. I found the homecoming dress and shoes, both on sale. The dress is Ann Taylor. I adore Ann Taylor.

Voila:

3. Keith and I were talking on the phone this morning.

"Do you have some chew in?" I asked him, out of the blue.

"Yes..." he says, in this voice that says, you are weird, but I love you. "Why do you ask?"

"Because I can hear it in your voice. It sounds like you're about to spit."

"I did just spit."

Ha. I can discern the rituals of my hubby's tobacco chewing habit by sound alone. Now that is love.

Wednesday

2009-07-07T20:23:00.000-07:00

This morning I woke and couldn't go back to sleep. There's something about the utter stillness of early morning, the fresh, untouched taste of the air and the peculiar slant of the light. It produced in me this sense of melancholy. The faint sound of traffic and the few crickets singing just enhanced it.

There is a breathless quality to these days, a kind of constant effervescence. It causes the melancholy to taste almost delicious. I am not afraid to feel longing for him, to give in to it completely, because it's so close to being satisfied.

I remembered the conversations I had had with Keith the night before, and I lay in bed savoring them for a long time before I got up.

"I do know one thing for certain."

"What's that?"

"I don't want to drive my car all the way to the new post. I want to be in the truck with you."

"I know that. That's why I'm going to sell the trailer and get one to put the car on. You will be in the truck with me."

How did he know that? I'd been worried about that for a long time and here he was, already knowing and having made plans to take care of it.

"I wish I'd known you in high school..."

"You kitten...did I ever tell you I drove the biggest truck in high school?"

"No!"

"No kidding! And I had (insert unintelligible vocabulary about technical details having to do with exhaust systems here) done and I would put it into first gear and..." At which point I space out and just listen to the sound of his voice and adore the enthusiasm, becauses I love that he is this kind of man even though I'll never understand a word he's saying.

When I listen to his voice over the phone, his face is a shifting conglomeration of memory and conjecture. The harder I try to bring him into focus the more it slips away. I think I remember the plane of his cheek, the play of expression across his features and then realize that I am bringing to mind only photographs, so familiar they have taken on a life of their own.

I look over my shoulder at the past year and it's like staring into the dark. I wonder how I could have made it through, the idea of going back there causes me to shudder with horror. Every once in a while I remember some fragment of routine or ritual that I needed at that point in the deployment, a certain song, the way I would dust even the table legs, how the neighborhood looked the first time I walked around it, in late September.

I am tired of the ritualized, monastic life I've been living; I want my irrepressible husband to come home and shatter the looking glass.

Tomorrow is Wednesday. Hopefully, (hopefully) there will be only two more Wednesdays before he is home. A girl can dream.

Passing the Time Away

2009-07-01T17:40:00.001-07:00

I just don't feel like writing. I feel like holding my breath instead, as though if I held it and my words, the time would go by faster or something. I'm all still inside.

But regular life is going on, just like always. Regular life for me lately consists of a lot of exercise. Really, either exercise is as good as sex or I've forgotten how good sex is. I suspect that latter. However, what I've forgotten can't hurt me and in the meantime, I'm floating in a sea of endorphins released by good old fashioned push ups.

Not to mention the pride that comes from being able to do push ups. Two weeks ago I was all excited because I could do five lady style push ups. A week later I did two regular push ups and I looked and sounded as though I were giving birth to an elephant. (Great visual, huh?)

This morning I did ten easy, did some other stuff and then did ten more. Hooha! Of course, my husband can do over eighty in a minute, but you know, I'm not in the Army. And anyway, I'm not looking to have upper arms the size of Easter hams. Muscle definition though? Hell, yeah, I'll take some of that.

I never thought I'd be one of those girls. You know, the athletic kind. I was the kind that scored points for my volley ball team by the ball hitting my forehead while I stood day dreaming, causing it then to soar unimpeded back up and over the net, where the opposing team was too flummoxed to defend themselves. I call that my secret ninja forehead attack. (I keep feeling like I've talked about that story before, but it's such a good one! And I don't feel like going back over all my blogs to check.)

Now, though! Now I have exercising outfits. I went to Target and bought some essentials after I realized that I really shouldn't go jogging in leather sandals, even if they were very comfortable. I now have cute little jogging shorts disguised as a skirt and sleeveless rayon tops with a little mesh stripe that runs down the back, making me feel faster and more fit than I really am.

The first night I worked out with my friend, I watched open mouthed as she calmly and quickly did a whole bunch of Russian twists, which is a variation on the lazy V, which is the biggest misnomer ever. The lazy V is being able to sit up only on one's butt, with legs and arms tucked up. Basically, the abbs are holding the entire body up in a v position. There is absolutely nothing lazy about it.

Russian twists are where one is in this position and then twists the upper body from side to side for as long as one can hold out. I am not afraid to state that my very first lazy v was much more like the drunken, upside down tortoise. While I flailed around, my very toes curling up in my desperation to stay upright, let alone go side to side, my friend was steady as a rock, whipping out twists and talking at the same time. Dude.

This morning, however, I was able to go from side to side one hundred times. Unless I missed my count. To put it another way, I was able to do Russian twists for most of the entire time Kenney Chesney was singing about how he went out last night, (even though he'd sworn he wouldn't) and met girls from, among other places, Maine. Naturally, a lot of beer was consumed.

Anyway, because of all this working out, my body is like unfamiliar terrain. I have muscle definition on places I didn't even think muscle existed. I actually, for one fleeting moment, glimpsed my abbs. Yes. They are not mythological after all. Like the Lochness Monster, they then dived right back under, but I swear I really saw them. I could probably produce blurry photographs if pressed.

At the dentist office, I was mistaken for an athlete. This delighted me to no end.

"I'm not really," I confessed, gleeful but honest. But there were my legs, looking damn good in shorts, tanned and muscled, on my feet sleek little running sneakers. It was as though someone had pasted a Nike advertisement over my usual self.

If it weren't for all this working out, I just don't know how I would be handling all the nerves and energy of being this close to seeing Keith. If there were somewhere written "A Girl's Guide to Deployment," exercising, preferably out of doors, would be listed in Chapter Three: Passable Substitutions for Sex. Also listed would be chocolate and French Martinis.

(Chapter One would be devoted to long distance communication techniques and Chapter Two to the absolute necessity for a community of the other deploymentally challenged.

Yep, I just made up a word, and I think it's a darn good one. Very PC. I could have used it at work many times this past year, on the phone.

"I'm sorry, sir, could you repeat that? I'm having a very deploymentally challenging day today. Month eleven, you know." He wouldn't know, of course. But still.

By the way, thank you all so much for your comments on my last post. I don't know what I would have done had I not been so fortunate as to stumble across this corner of the blogosphere.

Now, time to head off for some quickie walking lunges before bed...if only there were the exercise equivalent for snuggling...

And the Phone Rings...

2009-06-23T15:43:00.001-07:00

Last night I couldn't sleep. Nothing new. As usual, I was thinking of Keith. I was thinking of what a good man he is, full of the best kind of pride a man can have; the kind that is expressed in taking excellent care of his family.

I was thinking about this and joy and gratitude simply flooded through me. Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to tell him, to tell him how much it meant to be able to count on him, to be his. Not that I haven't before, but I just needed to say it right then.

And the phone rang.

"I was just praying for you to call!" I exclaimed in wonder.

"I have some good news," he said, and tingles went racing up my spine.

His 1st sergeant has recommended him for a slot open for a staff sergeant on the advance party. If he gets it, he will be home much sooner than I have ever thought to hope for.

"So I thought that was kinda neat," he finished up, humble.

"Kinda neat?" I exclaimed. "It's the best news we've had all year!!"

He couldn't talk long, he was running out of minutes. After he rang off, I lay in bed while excitement slowly flooded my entire body, from my feet to the top of my head. I simply had to squeeze something, so I squeezed his pillow. Poor neglected pillow; finally getting some attention.

Before getting that call, for the past week or so I'd been sitting in this little bubble. I knew he would be coming home, but I wasn't feeling it. I felt numb, along with a bad case of the writer's block. I was just waiting it out.

It was as if I had been just trudging along, one foot in front of the other. When he called, it was as though I lifted my head for the first time in a long time and the change of perspective took my breath away. We are so close. He will come home some time next month. And even if he does not get the slot, he is still only weeks away. Just weeks.

I feel like a newly wed. I feel like I should be registering for things, so we can set up house.

"I'll take a week off when you first get back," I was telling him earlier. I had been silently worrying about my job and what we would do about it when he got back. I decided it was time to bring it up.

"And then go I'll go back to work until block leave, and then take off all of block leave. After which I probably won't have a job," I finished up dryly.

"You won't need it," Keith said easily. "You'll be busy packing up, organizing the house and working on your writing."

Like wow. (Yes, I watched Scooby doo as a child.) I won't need my job. 'Cause I have a household. And my writing. And getting pregnant. Yeah. I foresee investing a lot of time in the pursuit of the last goal. I think that's a definite priority.

I've never not supported myself. I've sometimes had help, but I've always pulled my weight. I've never before just let go and completely fallen back onto someone else.

It's a good thing we've had plenty of practise in developing good communication techniques during this deployment. Spending "our" money is a very different thing from spending my money. From here on out there won't be any more my money.

This is a major reality shift; Keith has had to remind me many times to call the money he makes "ours." He works so hard for it, its difficult for me to justify spending it on something frivolous. I mean, he literally risks his life for that paycheck.

God, I love my husband. I love the way he plans so carefully and realistically, and then follows through. He has a generous and loving heart; he is true blue. I love all his rough edges, his penchant for giving orders, his bloody stubborn mindedness.

I love his optimism and rock steady confidence. It took a long time for me to recognize true confidence as opposed to arrogance. Only a truly confident man can immediately recognize when he's lost an argument and admit it. Keith does that. I love that about him. He won't stubbornly go on, just for the sake of winning. He doesn't need to win, he doesn't need to brag or show off, though he does. And I love that too. Oh what the hell, I just love everything about him.

I was looking at the game I bought him yesterday and a little shiver went through me, thinking of how soon he will be here, playing that game with the speaker system so loud the walls will vibrate. He will refuse to read the instructions. He will blame it on the game if consequently he makes a few errors at first.

He will want me right beside him, as his wing man; I watch out for the snipers and help come up with strategy. I will work out a compromise whereby he goes to bed earlier than he wanted to and I watch more game that I'd really like. He will beg me to stay up later than we agreed to and I probably will.

He is going to be home, this really will come to an end. I won't have to write about deployment any more. I'm bored writing about deployment. I'm tired of talking about memories. I want the real thing!

Dreams

2009-06-22T14:51:00.000-07:00

I had a strange dream this morning. Sometimes when I am very tired, I have dreams in the early morning that so closely mimic reality that I don't know I'm asleep. I think I've woken up and yet my body is as heavy as lead and I can't move.

I had one of those dreams this morning. Except that I was in a different house, somewhere on an Army post. The air was dim, I couldn't focus my eyes very well and I couldn't move. My parents were there and I could hear them moving around.

"Jenny, Keith's coming back today," Mom said, from somewhere out of my line of vision. I looked at the shadows moving across the wall, at the huge expanse of grey bed covers. I couldn't move, I was weighted down by exhaustion.

No, no, I wanted to tell her. He wasn't coming today, it wasn't that close. There was still over a month until he came. I could hear them getting ready to leave the house. I began to wonder, could it be?

"After all, the Rotation has begun," I thought to myself in awe. In the dream, this word had huge significance. It meant hundreds and hundreds of men were ready to leave, in waves, and hundreds other to come home, a huge transference of people and emotion. This rotation was imbued with heavy, almost religious symbolism. I knew my husband was caught up in this vast mechanism.

"He is coming home today!" I suddenly exclaimed to myself, electrified. "That's why he wanted me to get the computer game today! Because he's going to surprise me by coming home. I have to get that game, I have to get ready!"

And I threw myself out of the bed and woke the hell up, all tangled in the covers and already hot. The pieces of reality slowly fell into place around me. The funny thing is, Keith had called and woken me up out of a deep sleep around six thirty and we had talked about a video game (Kill Zone 2). He had impressed upon me that I absolutely had to get that game and I had remembered the urgency in my dream.

Even though it was just a dream, I bought the game anyway.

Lately

2009-06-19T18:32:00.000-07:00

I woke to an intriguing statement from my husband. I had woken early, in those long moments before the alarm is due to ring. The morning was tranquil and still and when the phone rang, it seemed as if I had known it would.

“I sent you a picture of something,” he said, pleased with himself. “It’s something for you to wear.”

Something to wear? I thought of jewelry, perhaps something silky and abbreviated. He had never before ventured into the uncertain waters of buying me clothing, always a risky business. Except for the Pajamagram for Valentine’s day, and we had ended up picking that out together.

I was not even close, he had picked out boots. Not cowboy boots or supple suede, knee length fashion statements. They were mid calf, mid Western farmer’s boots for women. Made with flat soles and plain, functional leather, they were a perfect match to his own, only much smaller.

After the initial puzzlement, I was flooded with sheer love for my darling farmer’s boy. It was not a romantic gift or even one that I would probably wear, but I could follow his train of thought so clearly written in the gesture; that he had thought of me, wanted to outfit me not only for the rigors of yard work and ATV riding, but to match himself.

“What happened to the one e-mail and blog a day?” he wanted to know.

“We never agreed to that! It was one e-mail a day…” my voice trailed off. “Are you bored?” I asked, light dawning.

His laughter was confirmation enough. Poor guy; there will be yet several more weeks of that sort of boredom.

I, on the other hand, have been exceptionally busy. I have been covering for a coworker all week, which means I will have worked seven days in a row by the time I'm done. At least it'll pay for all the eating out I've been doing.

On Wednesday, on a whim, I asked a friend of mine if she’d like to go out and get some margaritas and Mexican food after work. It was such a hot day and work was stressful and we got off at the same time and after all, it’s summer time.

So we went. We sat outside on the patio under an umbrella and drank the icy lime drink from tall glasses. I kicked my shoes off and put my bare feet up on the empty chair beside me. We ordered the lunch special, fajitas and they came out sizzling hot and deliciously tempting with scoops of sour cream and guacamole. There is something so satisfying about eating with one's hands.

Later, I went to the dog park with another good friend. Dogs spilled out of bushes, ran down the trails and splashed in the brook, noses down and tails up. They convened swiftly in loose groups, determining rank and gender, what everyone had for lunch.

Our two dogs leaped after one another in the field, looking like gazelles in the Serengeti. My friend has a Great Dane, a beautiful dog with a grey, speckled coat. She is about the size of a pony but plays just like a collie. Lynn is half her size, but was eager to join in the fun.

Afterward, my friend invited me over to her house for some torture and sweet potato fries. Ok, not really. Earlier in the week we had gone up to the outlet mall for some shopping and under the influence of yet another Margareta (I should really avoid those things!) I had assured her that yes, I really wanted to know what a Bear Crawl was.

Fast forward a couple days and I found myself doing a face plant in the carpet, wondering why I thought being in shape could possibly be worth this kind of agony. Bear crawls are deceptively simple. One gets down on all fours, both feet and hands on the ground and propels oneself forward as fast as possible. It hurts like hell and looks utterly ridiculous but damn if it doesn’t get results.

She showed me some other exercises with appealing names like the Dead Cockroach (which is worse, in its own way, than the Bear Crawl) and the Duck Walk. Before we knew it, over an hour had passed. I hurt all over and yet could feel the endorphins surging into my brain, as powerful as a drug and much more pleasant. I had drank four glasses of water, sweated just as much and laughed pretty much the entire time.

Later, we sat around the dinning room table as the light stretched low across the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The evening was warm and still and filled with the smell of sweet potato fries, which are so delicious it’s almost impossible to believe that they are in fact healthy. It’s been two days since then and I’m still sore.

Despite that, we’ve planned another work out session this evening and will continue torturing ourselves every other day until our men get back. It should make the time go by.

Boring Blog

2009-06-15T14:32:00.000-07:00

Apparently I make my husband nervous when I don't blog. That and him coming across comments from my mom on facebook asking me if I'm ok because I haven't written in a while. I got a worried phone call around 4:30am from Keith asking me if I was ok and chiding me for worrying my mom and telling me that I should blog more. Thanks, mom! :)

I have been writing; I've had the opportunity lately to process through a huge chunk of my life and doing so has been a deeply good experience, though painful at times. But I can't post any of it, which leaves me with the following basically boring blog entry.

1. I read my first Horacio Hornblower novel and damn if it isn't good reading. I mean, I'd always heard they were, but they really are. Except for the fact that he had an affair with a Russian noblewoman and didn't even blink an eye. I was expecting more in the way of character from a fellow named Horacio.

2. Recently I realized that it was possible to buy one onion at a time, as opposed to the mesh bag o' onions I had always felt drawn to in the past, leading to mass onion waste; because really, how many onions does a person use in a few weeks?

3. I like run on sentences with lots of punctuation that I'm not really sure how to correctly use, but throw in there anyway.

4. I may never see my abs and that's ok. Why? Because faced with a choice of rippling abs or a bag of potato chips, I'm going to choose the potato chips every single time.

5. Today I stepped on a moth and felt its dry, brittle body disintegrate under my bare heel. I have now faced my worst fear and lived to tell about it.

6. I listen to hip hop. That's right. I said it.

7. It is possible for a lamp shade to gather dirt to such a depth that one simply assumes the resulting cream color is its natural hue, only to be shocked into discovering that it was actually meant to be white when experimenting with the various vacuum attachments.

8. I've been carrying around in the back seat of my car Keith's big, dirty foot locker of stuff he didn't need over there anymore. I like looking in the rearview mirror and seeing his scrawling handwriting across the shipping label. What I like better though, was him telling me I should probably move it before coming to pick him up, since he'll need to toss his bags there.

Hello, beautiful world.

The Consequences of Missing a Call

2009-06-09T20:19:00.000-07:00

Last night I lifted a pan from the sink and lo and behold, a moth crawled out from under it. For the first time, terror did not jolt uncomfortably through my body. I watched the struggling creature with pity and then turned the water on and washed it down the sink.

I cannot say that we are co existing comfortably, the moths and I, but we seem to be finding some kind of compromise. They continue to come into the house to be trapped and to die without completing their cycle of mothy life, sadly. I step over them, around them, or sweep them out of the house with a broom, or go to bed armed with a dish towel in case they bumble by in the dark.

Tuesdays I look forward to, Tuesday has become the day when I let myself give into my food cravings, lest they overtake me completely and I eat them all the time. It's my outlet day. Usually I have a bag of chips.

Last night I was dreaming about Chinese food. I knew of a good restaurant down the street, but it was too far from home; I wasn't feeling that adventurous. I decided I would just stop in at the first one I saw.

That turned out to be a generic Chinese buffet. I was nervous, for some reason, more than usually nervous. And when I opened the door to be greeted by a huge, bustling room my nervousness exploded.

The hostess smiled a hundred watt smile at me.

"Do you have take out?" I managed to whisper.

They did, sort of. I could pay seven fifty for a take out box and fill it from the buffet with whatever I wanted. This was not what I wanted. I wanted the white paper cartons with the red dragons printed on the sides, with grease slicks and chopsticks, perfect for curling up on the couch and mindlessly eating while movie watching.

But my innate need to be a good girl kicked me in the ass; I was unable to say no thank you and leave. So, armed with my Styrofoam box I approached the steaming islands of Chinese cuisine. Around them swirled people, some of them soldiers from on post. This spiked my anxiety to newer, excruciating levels.

I had been particularly craving crab Rangoons and so piled four of them in my box, then scooped various other stuff in, whatever looked good. I knew that it would all run together and possibly tip out and spill in the car, but at that point I didn't care, I just wanted to escape as quickly as possible.

Back home, the food had indeed run together and it was very bad Chinese at that. I felt cheated out of my weekly calorie free for all. Worst of all, the crab Rangoons were dry and almost tasteless and I had forgotten a little container of sauce to dip them in.

However, my choice of a movie was almost made up for it; I had come across "Moonstruck" and knew immediately that it was the movie I had been dying to watch, perhaps for weeks now.

When it was over I wandered back up into the kitchen for something to drink and heard that most horrible of sounds, the chiming that indicates I have a new voicemail. My phone will sometimes take voicemail when the poor reception will not actually allow the call itself. This happens frequently downstairs where I watch movies.

I had missed two calls from Keith; he had left two voice mails. He didn't have time to call again, he was calling right before a mission. I felt sick to my stomach; my entire day was ruined. I left my phone upstairs on the table by the front door where I could hear it if it rang while I watched the second movie, but it was too late. He didn't call again.

The second movie I knew was an emotionally risky one, but it looked really good. I had chosen "Chrystal" with Billy Bob Thornton. It's set in the deep South, in the Ozark mountains. It was an excellent movie and I emerged from watching it feeling as though I were waking from a dream, and with a profound sense of isolation.

I sat outside on the deck, hoping the fresh air would wash the feeling away, but thunderclouds were massing low over the mountains and the air was thick and dim. I heard the traffic rushing by, several blocks away; it was almost five o'clock.

Usually I feel this kind of unfocused sense of loss and isolation during the third week of the month and it is closely tied to my month cycle. It's far to early for that, it must have been missing those calls.

I never did recover the day, though I turned on the TV to be distracted, to be pulled back into the daily pulse of life around me. I was informed of a lot of stuff that I can't do anything about and that I really would rather not know and then the sun finally came out of the clouds, so I turned the thing off.

Last night a fragment of a memory came back to me, piercingly sharp in it's impact. It was simply of the windshield wipers going back and forth, back and forth across the water slick glass and the sound they made and the sound of the rain on the truck roof as we sat at an intersection in Southern Indiana. The foliage seemed to encroach the road, to engulf the truck.

The rest of the memory is more hazy, but I remember Keith sat beside me literally shaking with rage. I remember how carefully I craned my head to see around the bushes growing at the corners of the road, checking for oncoming traffic through the blurred windshield and the lights changing up head. I remember pressing down on the gas and feeling the rush of power as the truck went forward, aggressive and smooth.

I keep returning to this memory, not because it is significant, but because it is still raw and carries with it the imprint of a man whose memories have become hazy in my mind. All the other memories have become lacqored from over use.

Though when I go back to this memory and follow it forward in time then I can clearly see the narrow winding back country roads and the house where we were staying. I can remember opening the truck door and smelling the rain and the smell of damp and rotting wood, how the loose stones in the driveway turned my ankles in my high heeled sandals and the beads of water on the black, highly glossed sides of the truck.

I can see Keith standing by the soaked firepit, talking on his cell phone, how his shirt pulled across his wide shoulder blades, the back of his neck, closely shaved and vulnerable looking and the black cap pulled low over his face. I can hear his voice even, in this memory, I just can't remember the words. I can simply hear the emotion.

I remember my own surge of feeling, of love and resignation both; knowing I could not make it better, that I had to wait for Keith to work through it and then back to me.

The next day was our last in Indiana; we woke on strangely patterned sheets that were not our own, in a strange bedroom with the fan whirling lazily overhead and the sunlight already outlining the window shades.

That night he drove me through the early morning hours into Kentucky for my flight back. There was construction all along the sides of the roads, endless rows and rows of orange cones glowing eerily in the night; I can hear Keith cursing under his voice as he manuvered between them, along the narrow, shifting route they outlined.

"I don't have to go," I told him, standing on the curb, my arms around his shoulders. With the help of the curb, I was almost face to face with him.

But I went, spent a week back East on my parent's front porch. There were paperback novels and a bag of chips on the bed upstairs where I would sleep, on the patchwork quilt that was heavy and cool to the touch.

In the long evenings I went swimming, my arms pulled me way out into the center of the lake. Wading out of the shallows, I felt my body settle back down onto my bones, the weight sinking my heels deep into the sand. The water in my ears blocked the sounds around me, I heard faintly my brother's laughter, the sound of my own pulse filled my head.

When I arrived back in the city, the heat was almost unbearable. The sun glared from countless cars and trucks in the long term parking lot at the airport, the pavement sent the heat back up into the heels of my shoes, my little bag rolling noisily behind me. I sat in my own car and turned the ignition with a profound sense of relief.

Traffic was slow on the way down to our house, long lines of vehicles were crawling along the wide interstate under the heat of the late afternoon. I missed Keith's call, my phone buried in my purse on the passenger seat, the radio volumn as high as it would go; I was listening to all those songs I couldn't hear any more now that I didn't live in the city.

When I got to our house, he was already gone on some erronds, he hadn't waited for me. I sat on the front step and cried with the disappointment of it. The geranium was half dead from lack of watering while we had been away, inside the air conditioner had turned the air crisp and somehow impersonal, like the air of the lobby of a bank.

Sitting on our bed, I called him.
"You didn't wait for me."

"I waited two hours! I have to get this stuff done."

"I was stuck in traffic."

"I tried calling you; I knew you were blaring that stupid music."

"You could have waited for me. You were just angry that I missed your call and decided to punish me by leaving early."

"I did not," he said, unexpectedly laughing. "Hun. I'll be back soon."

"You ruined it!" I admitted. The corners of my mouth kept wanting to twitch upward into a smile. "You ruined our reunion; I wanted to run into your arms and instead I came home to an empty house and now I'm all angry at you."

When the truck pulled into the driveway I waited upstairs, putting my book down. Nervous then, I waited until he opened the front door and heard him call for me. We met at the top of the stairs. He took the stairs two at a time, he was huge, he was like a lumberjack and he had grown a red bronze beard that made him look like a ruffian, like a pirate.

All in a moment I drew back. His eyes flickered uncertainly, he stopped, he was poised at the top of the stairs. His eyes lost their light and dropped inward, and then I knew him. I knew him for the clarity of his eyes, a clean and rain washed blue, the upright and moral character they reflected so clearly.

I leaned forward and his eyes caught fire again, it was as though the moment had never happened. He swooped down and grabbed me up in his arms; he tossed me, laughing, onto the bed while he kicked off his boots.

Later I traced his beard with my finger. My cheeks were chapped from it, but I still couldn't get over how attractive the beard was on him, how it highlighted his rapscallion nature.

"Don't shave it," I requested, shy.

But the next morning I heard the burr of the electric shaver and he emerged, apologetic and clean shaven, returned completely to the man I had first fallen in love with. I forgot all about the pirate. It was mid July and nothing then stood between us and his deployment; we had one and a half months left.

Sunday Afternoon

2009-06-07T15:34:00.000-07:00

It is now two twenty six in the afternoon on a Sunday in early June. Clouds are billowing up from over the mountains, awaiting mass and force before unleashing their harbored energies. Already the wind is racing, laying flat the long grasses of the park and buffing the surface of the river.

Red, white and blue bunting was put up this morning and the wind has caused the swags to lift up and to sail away on a moment’s notice. Several visitors have made their entrance with stray bunting in hand.

The lazy, repetitive strains of Lorraine’s Olde Time Piano social can be clearly heard all the way from the parlor. One resident sings gamely along; the fact that he can no longer remember the words no deterrent at all from his enthusiastic enjoyment of the tunes. This musical performance has the ability to stretch the afternoon out indefinitely.

The house dog stretches over onto his back, leaning into my desk and spreading his limbs. His tongue and eyelids go lolling, presenting a strange and unnerving sight to unsuspecting visitors.

La Madam Resident is roaming the halls, cane in hand. Her patrician features have long ago frozen into a scowl worthy of Balzac. When the closed circuit of her pacing takes her to my desk, her scowl bursts into a cry of horror at the music. Her cane stabs at the air for emphasis.

“She is suppose to play for one hour!” La Madam declares. “Instead she plays now for one hour an’ a half!”

“It is very tedious,” I say, with great empathy.

“It is an horror!”

The residents of the down stairs floor have recently come back from a soft ball game. They returned happy, gently waving their straw hats and went meandering off down the halls while one of their number was being assisted in a wheelchair.

I retrieved the wandering from imminent misplacement by taking a hold of one moist and half curled hand. She whispered to me in the hallway, but by now she speaks a language no one but she can understand.

One resident now sits monumental in his wheelchair, opposite my desk, and drawls on about the decorating. Each word he speaks is a clear illustration of Ohio, his native state.

“What they should do, see, is store it for the winter,” he declares, one foot up on a foot rest. “She’s getting’ ready for the car show, see.” He rolls on into the bistro to prepare for Bingo.

I sit and share a popsicle with an afternoon care manager. It is an orange twin pop and shatters under my teeth into stinging splinters of cold sweetness. It is the kind of popsicle that always ends up falling off the stick toward the end, smearing sticky orange on the desk and the back of my hand.

While we eat the sun comes out from the clouds, a bunting I had jerry rigged with elastic flies loose and Lorraine continues her piano playing indefatigably, switching keys seamlessly between each and every repeat of the five songs in her repertoire.

“She doesn’t stop,” declares La Madam in a voice imbued with fatalism. “She is a pain in the neck.” She says the last four words in a rush, as though they were one word and furtively, as though not sure of the Americanism.

Bingo is begun regardless, it being the heart and soul of Sunday’s activities. The residents have been gathered from the far corners of the building; from quiet, shadowy rooms and from wing chairs where they were dozing off the cheese chowder from lunch.

Now they peer earnestly forward over their cards, listen to the drone of numbers.

“Gee fifty one,” the care manager intones. “G-5-1. Gee fifty one.”

This rhythm appears to be deeply soothing to the residents. They are marooned at the far and solitary banks of life and the numbers give them a feeling of certainty. There, before them, is unmistakably G-51.

They are often dreaming of the forgotten corners of their life, their fickle memories lifting and shutting like a window blind in a breeze. Sometimes they do not know if what they see is their memory, or their children’s, or a dream they had long ago.

It does not matter; either way they are pulled down a long, narrow corridor in their mind until someone calls out “Bingo!” and the numbers are reset.

All the while the warm scent of baking cookies comes curling around the corner to where I sit, looking busy and wishing that like countless receptionists before me, I could at least be doing my nails.

By the time Bingo is finished, the afternoon will have been gathered irretrievably into evening, a long summer evening with the leaves outside the wide windows silvering in the wind.

After dinner, while I am shuffling cards for Skip bo, perhaps the storm will pour out rain, releasing the scent of wet tarmac and the lamp lights will streak across the parking lot.

The members of the Skip bo club and I will sit at the little table in the empty bistro, I will stretch my aching legs out under the table and sigh. La Madam will contentedly shuffle the discard pile when it is not her turn and Ohio will chuckle silently over his latest run of good luck.

Quiet Emma with the lovely eyes will turn her head and look out the windows to the storm, the rain striking the ground and leaping back up again, the air full of spray, everything glistening.

“It’s a quiet evening,” she will say, her voice will be full of peace.

And we will all agree.

Moths Still

2009-06-05T11:26:00.001-07:00

The moths in the house are slowly dying. When they die, they remain where they fell. The dying moths are joined by new, energetic moths. Therefore, my house is full of dead, dying, fleeing and disintegrating moths. There is a particularly large one on the bathroom sink which has been preventing me from using the toothbrush holder for the past...four, five days?

What kind of a godforsaken housekeeper am I, you may well ask. I am a housekeeper afflicted with a phobia is what. Today I dragged the vacuum cleaner upstairs to try and take care of some moth business. I went to get the mail first and was affronted with the sight of a large, dead moth hanging inside the door.

This was my opportunity to use the vacuum cleaner, so I dragged it over, attached the hose and tried to steel my nerves to suck the dead (I hoped it was dead) moth into the hose. The large body thunked against the hose on its way down, causing much freaked out behavior from me. A puppet on strings in an earthquake; that might be what I looked like. Except that I was shrieking.

I managed to vacuum up a few more dead bodies in the kitchen before I exhausted myself with the horror. I really think it must be a phobia. There is no other way to describe the intensity or my inability to change my reactions.

Still jittery, I went to the sink to wash up the dishes from the night before only to find a large dead moth floating in a pan.

"Dear God," I sighed. "Really? Are you done? Wouldn't you like to go play with someone else now?"

When I drive, I keep the windows up because the moths cling to the car for a mile or two. I never know when some stray current of air will force them, wings flaying, up against the glass window. As a good friend of mine knows, myself and a moth in a moving vehicle is not a good combination for any of the parties involved.

So now I have chopped moth down the insinkerator, various moths in the vacuum bag and the large dead one still on the bathroom counter.

Further reports as events warrant.

Love

2009-06-01T13:15:00.000-07:00

"I'll tell ya what, I'll make us some cocktails and we'll sit out on the back deck and solve all the world's problems," drawled Keith affectionately.

"It's a date," I cried, delighted. "I'll be there!"

"Well, I look forward to it," Keith replied in his rough, mischievous voice.

God, I am so in love with my husband. It's like I'm sixteen all over again, before everything in my life went bad. When talking on the phone with him I find myself slowly sinking downward until my head is resting on whatever object was available, the stair rail, the back of a kitchen chair. If he calls at night, I tend to throw the bedclothes over my head and huddle down into the pillow, hold the phone with both hands and whisper.

We talked for a long time last night and then all of a sudden he had to go. We said our "I loves you's" quickly and then he was gone. Ten minutes later I heard the phone ring again.

"Baby, are you ok?" I asked immediately.

"Yeah," he said, shy. "I just had a coupla' more minutes to talk."

"You know what I was day dreaming about it?" I asked wistfully, kicking at the bedclothes.

"What were you day dreamin' about?" he asked tenderly.

"About grillin' out on the back porch this summer when you get back and for some reason, I was thinking about your crazy friend and his wife and how they were always over..."

"Hun!" he cried. "I saw him a few days ago, did I tell you?"

Actually, I had been day dreaming about how we would grill out on a rainy day, because Keith loves rainy days and how I would sit on the wide porch railing close up the grill. And in between tending to the grill Keith would be leaning into me and I was remembering how good he always smelled, even if it was just his skin, or the cotton tee shirt.

Throughout the entire deployment we have been remarkably chaste in our conversations together. Sometimes I couldn't help teasing my poor husband just a little bit, mostly just because I love the way he responds with "Honey!" in such a darling and helpless way. "Now, honey, you be good," he'll plead, laughing.

Well, lately the tables have turned. The first time he did this, my first and instinctive reaction was lady-like horror; no one talks to me that way! Who does he think he is...And then a shiver of pure pleasure went down my skin in a rush from head to toe when I realized that he was my husband and had every right to talk to me that way.

"Poor Abby won't know what to do," I told Keith last night. "I trained her not to sleep on my side of the bed and she won't be able to sleep on yours anymore."

"She can sleep on the goddamn floor for all I care-that's my bed," Keith replied, matter of fact.

Yes, it most certainly is.

A Tale of Two Friends

2009-06-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

My very best friend growing up was a beautiful, strawberry blond girl named Laura. We were serene in the knowledge that our best friendship was meant to be; our mothers were friends before us and had had the foresight to get pregnant and give birth to girls within the same year. They then followed up this master stroke by producing a ragtag bunch of boys who provided counter point to our perfect harmony.

Initially we had to be separated due to the sad fact that at the age of two we had not quite learned the art of sharing. No sooner had we grown up enough to enjoy one anothers company than my father decided that he couldn't handle the heavy snows of upstate New York winters and the depressed local economy.

We left the family dairy farm in the gently rolling valley that sheltered the pastures and oak trees of my early childhood for southern New Hampshire, near my mother's family and began to live a different sort of life.

However, every summer we returned to New York for two weeks in the family station wagon; I remember the blue vinyl seats and the windows that had to be cranked down, eating crackers and cream cheese for snacks on the way up.

Sometimes in the high ridges of the Vermont mountains my father would pull the wagon over to the side of the road and we would all tumble out, go careening down the steep banks to the creek below. Mother would call out to watch out for poison ivy and follow more slowly with the younger children, Scott or Jesse.

Timmy and I would not hesitate to jump rock to rock across the creek in our bare feet; if the current were fast enough, my father would ride down the rapids on the his belly. We chased the water bugs that skated over the amber water and pulled crayfish out of their hiding places as we had been taught to, by the curling, whipping tail in order to avoid being pinched by the tiny, though vicious little claws.

As soon as the New York State sign was sighted a great cry would rise up. From there on we were guided back home by familiar landmarks; the garish face painted on the water tower at Albany, the farm with three towering silos, their white roofs blinding in the sun.

As we turned got deeper and deeper in the farm land of upstate New York, I would be on the edge of my seat, watching each cultivated and gently curving hill pass by, each little meandering brook and ramshackle farm houses surrounded by packed dirt and car parts.

The dirt at the sides of the roads became pale pink, rose and rock red in color, the dusky rose color of the dirt roads was in perfect harmony with the lush green on each side and the canopy of green that often over hung the road. The rose dust clung to the sides of the station wagon.

"Buffalo!" famously called out my younger brother once, when confronted for the first time with hay bales lying in a field. This was never forgotten. Hay bales that had been wrapped in white sheeting became "Ghost buffalo."

At long last we would be in our own little valley of old; the family dairy farm now sold but still standing for a long time, the barn leaning farther and farther to the side. The road would dip down, pass by a trailer at the edge of a brook over hung with weeping willow trees and then up and there would be the sharp turn up into my best friend's house.

Her parents had achieved legendary status in my mind by the act of having built their own log house with their own hands. For this, they loomed in my mind along with the likes of Paul Bunyan and the parents of Laura Ingalls. Their rough hewn house, even their thick, brown patterned dishes fit in well with this image.

They had a wide front porch and a fuzzy yellow dog, the kind of good natured and eager dog whose kind eyes were obscured by fur. Laura's room was patterned red, white and blue. She had beautiful little porcelain figurines that she had received for birthdays. She had music boxes with little ballerinas on tiptoe within. She has sparkly cosmetics, long strands of beads and other necklaces, books and the sound track to "The Phantom of the Opera."

Mostly though, we had Barbies. I brought my own box of Barbies and our combined collection spread in overflowing heaps across the floor. We each chose our own most important doll, the one to represent ourselves; mine almost always had dark hair. I loved the one with the underwear printed into the plastic of the doll's body, she also had very movable limbs; I was drawn to her range of expression and natural modesty.

Then we would choose our Kens. These were always in short supply, but we made do. They also had a limited wardrobe. I tended to dress my Ken in heavy work clothes, Laura's Kens were more elegant and dashing.

Once the basics were in play, we laid out our houses using whatever came to hand. Then the saga would begin and "Days of Our Lives" had nothing on us. Our Barbies had lineages; they lived through generations. They triumphed over tragedies, they loved with passion, without restraint. They came with us on camping trips, they sometimes were taken outside to play out the drama of their lives in a leafy setting.

We didn't limit ourselves to Barbies during our summer week. Laura had fabulous dress up dresses, include one frothy yellow gown that billowed out in a perfect circle when we pirouetted. We lived out many, many lives wearing those dresses. Our most gripping drama was that our men were away at war and we had to make it through the dark times of occupation and danger without them, with our babies clutched close to hand.

These games could last for the entire day and were played mostly outside. Laura's log house was build at the top of a steep ridge. There was a narrow trail that zigzagged down the embankment; all the children knew this trail by heart and could fly down it at incredible speed, our arms outspread for balance, almost without looking where we were putting our feet.

At the bottom of the ridge was a clear, swift creek that ran over a shifting layer of smooth river stones. It never got much deeper than one's knees and was bordered by thick, high green rushes to one side. We would make our home in the rushes, packing them down on the inside and making trails throughout it. There was also a tree house build off the ridge and we made our home there as well.

Our adventures were many and varied. She stayed with me at my grandparent's house one week. My father's parents still lived in upstate New York and my brothers and I would spend a week with them after our week with Laura's family.

On this visit we were sleeping in the room and in the very bed where my great grandfather had lived, and we presumed, had died. In order to further disturb ourselves, we were telling ghost stories in the dark when we heard a faint, but distinctive thump.

We assured ourselves it was nothing, but a few minutes later another thump was heard. Though we were in the habit of letting our imaginations run riot, we still knew the difference between our own worlds and reality. And the thump was most certainly real.

Goosebumps ran up my spine, we looked at each other in the double bed, eyes wide in the dark. The thought was the same; that the dead great grandfather was making his slow but deliberate way down the hall to claim his room and his bed.

I don't know how long we tortured ourselves in this way, but eventually we realized that we ourselves were the cause of the thumps; it was the bed hitting the wall behind us as we shifted position.

We had a very clear plan about what would happen when we grew up. She would marry a tall, blond beach boy, from California, preferably. I would marry a tall, dark and handsome man, from Scotland, preferably. We would live next door to each other and our children would run in and out of each other's houses as they grew up.

We took for granted that our lives would continue to be as closely intertwined as our braided hair, the day our parents met half way at the deer park to exchange us back. The red gold and red black strands was to each the perfect foil for the other and we walked hobbled, arm around each other's waists, our heads bent in to accommodate the braid.

The fact that our lives led us far away from each other, I have realized lately, is one of my greatest regrets. I wish that life were simpler; that one stayed put in one place and that friendships could grow and deepen in the common soil of a shared space.

I am pissed at life that I hardly know her children except in pictures, that she cannot walk over on a morning to drink a cup of coffee on the deck while the children play in the back yard, or call to compare what to make for dinner when we've run out of ideas or to gossip about our husbands; hers the tall dark and handsome one, mine the blue eyed farm boy with copper colored hair.

I see pictures of her and I cannot begin to describe the emotions it evokes; the sight of her face is so familiar it is almost as though I am looking at a mirror, she holds pieces of myself that I could never find anywhere else. I find her as beautiful now as I did as a child and even in pictures of her I can see her sunny spirit shine through so clearly, her gift for enjoying life, her daring me to sneak out into the dark, to fly down the slip and slide, to wear the crazy hats and to laugh.

When Keith and I move, we will be within eight hours of where she lives and you bet I'm going to be making that trek just as often as I possibly can. Maybe my children will get to know that route just as well as I got to know the winding highways that took us through the Green Mountains of Vermont and down into the fertile valleys of New York state.

Maybe we'll meet halfway for a weekend sometime, leaving the kids with our men and staying up late in the hotel room with a bottle of wine and hours of talk and then go garage sale-ing the next day. Maybe I'll have pictures of her in our new house, helping to paint the kitchen, both of us jazzed up on coffee and pastries from the store on the corner.

God, I hope so. Life is just to short and friendships that began with an inarticulate fight over a Kewpie doll are impossible to replace and despite life's twists and turns, just as impossible to lose.

Turning a Calendar Page

2009-05-30T19:11:00.000-07:00

I'm flipping the calendar over to June tonight. I feel in a way as though I am turning over so much more than that page. I am turning my back on the endless winter, last fall when the dying light sent me slowly but surely into depression, and this spring that seemed to drag out forever. All of that has closed; I need never go back there again.

Lately I keep having visions of myself in a rocking chair, by a window full of light and my body fallen down all around me in pieces, wearing all the injuries of age. At that point, the body becomes like an anchor, something that one carefully and cautiously arranges. Getting in to and out of bed is a long, slow and deliberate process.

For whatever reason I have been thinking of myself at this age, perhaps because I have worked with the elderly for so long, perhaps because I have become so aware of the passing of time this year, or perhaps because I am over thirty.

I am not afraid of growing old, which amazes me. I should be; I have seen up close what it does to a person. But I think by that time I will no longer care very much. I'll be caught up in an absorbing inner life. I will be invested in the patient work of putting a life to rest, going through piece by piece. I hope I will forgive myself grievances long harbored. I hope I will have wisdom I can only guess at now.

I don't know where Keith will be; if he will be with me in person or just in thought. Until I met Keith, I figured that I simply had a nature that would always be ready to fall in love again, should the current love end by death or disaster.

I had myself almost convinced that it was old fashioned and unhealthy to wish to love a man into the hereafter, to wait for him if he passed on ahead. But it wasn't my nature, and it isn't either bad or good; I just hadn't met Keith yet.

I recently purchased some curtains for the kitchen and sent Keith an e-mail with some pictures and detailed how much money I had spent on them and other little projects I had been working on. This is the response I got back (edited some for content):

"Holy crap, Kitten, that looks amazing!!! I am so proud of you!!! I always wanted something there by the window but could never figure out what would look good. You did a perfect job, and for so cheap.

"Thank you for the pictures of the garage and the HD. It is refreshing to see them again, and the grass looks better than I ever had it! My honey is working so hard!!! I love you!! I am a very lucky man! I feel like I won a prize!!!!! I win everything!!!!! You are such a great woman, I can't stop dreaming about coming home to you. I love you."

(E-mails like this illustrate perfectly why he is referred to as the beloved tempest...)

If I look back at this point in my life, I will remember this deepening feeling of relief. I keep thinking of that little known ending to the fairy tale, "The Frog King." In it, the frog king has a good and loyal servant named Faithful Heinrich. When his king was turned into a frog, poor Heinrich had iron bands fastened around his heart to keep it from breaking.

When his king was restored to him and he was riding behind the coach that held the happy couple, his heart began to swell with such joy that the iron bands to break. This caused the king some anxiety. Faithful Heinrich had to reassure him each time that the sharp cracks were not the coach breaking, but Heinrich's heart bursting free of its iron constraints.

Which reminds me. I've been watching a great deal of Disney movies, as Keith has sent me a huge packet of them. Some of the films were enchanting. "Bedknobs and Broomsticks," for example, with that catchy melody, "Bobbing along, bobbing along on the bottom of the beautiful, briny sea..."

I enjoyed watching that immensely. That and "The Secret of Nymh." What a beautiful film that is. It made me cry, though when I watched it as a child it seemed much longer.

However, what gives with the Little Mermaid? Was she eviscerated? Does she not have two kidneys, a spleen, lower intestines? Or does she not need any of those internal organs because she imbibes predigested food?

I would not mind her bizarre and unnatural waist line so much if Disney had not taken the heart right out of the fairy tale. I believe the gripping part of the fairy tale was not just that the little mermaid gave up the sea, but that she accepted excruciating pain with each step she took on her unnatural legs. Even so, she danced for her prince. Even so, he didn't chose her. She turned into sea foam.

"Dear God!" I hear the collective gasp across suburbia. "Not a happy ending??" Little girls of about three or four are forbidden ever to hear that. There must be a happy ending, there must be scalloped sea shells adoring snotty red haired mermaids who ignore their father and attempt to comb their hair with a fork because above all, the cartoon must be humorous.

It is not generally accepted that to risk all and lose, to resist the easy way out, or that to end up a spirit in the air and not a Princess with a crown might actually be a happy ending. It might be, but it won't sell cheap plastic toys and dust ruffles.

And Heracles? Why even talk about this one, it must have been the point to so distort and destroy the original tale that the very distortion became entertainment. I just sat there, stunned, confused and deeply irritated while watching it. They couldn't have shown the real tale, there is too much cruelty, too much horror and murder. There is also redemption and heroism, but altogether, it's not for children.

There are beautiful animated films out there, Hayao Miyazaki has made many of them. His films are full of all the dark and human truth of the Brothers Grimm, with real magic and courage and passion. And they are beautiful and haunting to watch.

There. That rant was a long time coming. Now I am officially a snob who will be shown her place when her three year old daughter won't eat her dinner unless it's served to her on a garish plastic plate with Ariel enshrined therein.

What a fate that would be. Speaking of fate, the moths are still with me. But I have figured out that they are Miller Moths or Army cutworms. (Yes. I have military moths surrounding me. I have noted the irony.) They are migrating moths, on their way higher up into the Rockies, after being spawned in the Eastern planes. They will die in a few days and the migration lasts into June.

Somehow knowing more about it makes me feel better. Still, freak outs are the order of the hour around here. The dogs have no idea what to do with me.

Attack of the Killer Moths

2009-05-30T18:41:00.000-07:00

Last night I was prevented from taking a shower by the presence of not one, but two dark, furry bodied moths. I stood in horror, clutching my can of spider spray and watching them dip and clatter erratically around. They had been sprayed and yet were clearly not dying. I gave up and went to bed.

In the morning, one appeared to be dead in the tub. (It was not, long story, won't go into it. But it's dead now, damn it!) There was a dead one on the living room floor, a dead one inside the sliding door groove and a live one downstairs by the window. I screamed like a girl on and off all morning.

When I screamed and hopped about in shuddering horror for like the zillionth time on the back porch, the good neighbor Larry asked me very cautiously if I was doing ok. He appeared to be very grateful for the fence. I explained my dilemma.

"What is going on? Is it the season for them? What am I going to do?" I wailed.

He explained that this happens once every few years. Great. I am living in the middle of a genuine moth epidemic. He handed me over the fence a large container of indoor/outdoor pest killer that they have been spraying everywhere in their house.

"Spray it on the lamps," recommended Mrs. Good. "That's where they like to be. We've been using fly swatters too."

"Do you want one?" asked Larry the Good.

I figured the insecticide would be enough, especially considering that I can't get close enough to the moths to kill them with a swatter anyway. (Involuntary shudder of horror.) I sprayed the stuff everywhere and goddamn if the moths didn't come out of every crack and crevice in the goddamn house.

The front door was the worst. I sprayed that and an entire cloud, a cloud of moths rose up darkly against the light, igniting such fear in my heart that I ducked and covered, screaming, bobbing and weaving as though I were being shot at.

Now I do feel a little better. The spray should keep them out for the next three months (and Keith will be here long before then!!) and I haven't come across a moth for a little while now.

They are lurking outside though; when I moved the car scores of them rose up in agitation. They are hiding out in the bushes, crawling across the screens and batting about against the street lights.

I just hope and pray I don't dream about them tonight.

Simple Joys

2009-05-28T14:09:00.000-07:00

Well, thank God for sunshine. And lemons five for a dollar and Keith finally having a date out of the sand box! I also got a large portion of the initial consult fee from the cosmetic dentist back, and promptly cashed it in and then traded that for loads and loads of bright, summer annuals.

I switched the bright blue pansies out for pale pink wave petunias bordered by sweet alyssum, little bunches of tiny white flowers. Now there are terra cotta pots of blue pansies everywhere around the house, on the front steps with the white hydrangea and along the table on the back deck.

At the local grocery, I make myself buy whatever fresh produce is on sale. Lately it's been lemons, kiwi, zucchini, melons and eggplant. I didn't know what on earth I would do with some of this bounty at first, but obviously, lemonade came to mind. It turned out delicious, but I really need a juicer.

I sliced the eggplant and roasted it with olive oil, Parmesan cheese, and Italian herbs and ate it with spaghetti sauce over top. It was really good. It was good without the sauce. In fact, I may go back, get another eggplant (they're one for a dollar), slice them up thin and bake them crispy. They tasted amazingly like potato chips.

I have been to the library and have a new armful of books to work my way through, fresh melons to be sliced and lemonade in the fridge. There's a load of laundry in the wash, which means fresh sheets on the bed tonight, smelling of lavender and tomorrow it will be in the eighties and I will have the whole day to enjoy the sun.

Stuck in a Moment

2009-05-26T15:12:00.000-07:00

(I don't know if any of my readers are offended by what my mother would refer to as bad language, but if you are, be warned. I have used some in this post.)

Well, I have had a very fun day of pretending not to be in a terrible mood. Now I have decided to embrace reality with enthusiasm. I did not get dressed until 1pm. I spent the entire dreary, cloud covered morning in my bathrobe watching season one of Army Wives again and eating the rest of the bag of potato chips that I purchased on my way home from work last night.

Shall I speak of Army Wives the show? Naw. I don't want to go there. But I am partial to the light. They seem to always shoot the scenes drenched in summer light, early afternoon, late afternoon, mid day, everything is brilliant. That had me hooked, that and the colors. I want now to go out and purchase some crocheted pillows, some bright yellow plastic pitchers, yards and yards of gratuitous fabric and halter tops. I'll pretend to be someone entirely different.

I hate a few days. I hate six days, to be exact. Right now, at this moment in time, this moment that will never come again, I hate the last few days of May.

I hate the few days until Keith calls. I hate the continuous cloud cover that will preside over the next six days.

It was rainy all weekend. I hate the rain. I hate having to dress warm in May. I want a nice roaring fire, a cup of tea and Keith. In the opposite order. I am stuck in a moment.

I've been starved lately. I've longed for the most ridiculous of foods, like brie cheese on crusty break or Doritios or cookie dough ice cream. Cinnamon buns with dripping icing or French toast. Pastrami on rye with melted cheese. Stuffed crust pepperoni pizza with so much grease it goes running off the top of the pizza in a light golden stream and turns the paper plates translucent.

I prowl the kitchen, I tear open cupboard doors even though I know what I will find. Nothing. I eat tuna fish salad, egg salad, chili, fruit, yogurt and granola. Everything in small quantities. I have lost a lot of weight. I walk religiously. It might be my religion. I walk every single day and for those forty minutes, I am that mindlessly happy that is the product of a body that has sweated enough.

I am sick and tired of having a perfectly good man and not being able to roll around in our large, comfortable bed with him. I mean, for God's sake. I have a man. There is a male of the species out there, in good health and with all the right equipment and he belongs to me and I can't have him. And it sucks ass.

Though out deployment I could not complain like this. I could not embrace the suck because the suck was far to vast to wrap my arms around and if I tried, it would pull me down into some bottomless pit from which I would not have escaped.

In fact, back then I imagined that reaching this point would be nothing but sheer bliss. I imagined it an unfocused melting away of time, everything would pass by in a blur, burned away by the proximity to Keith's return.

Well, goddamn it, that is not how it works. At least not for me. What happens instead is that I have stepped into some kind of cursed time lag where a week takes on the length of an entire month and days are endless and a month appears to go on and on and on like a terrible disco song from the seventies and I can't change the goddamn radio station.

In addition to this time warp, my reward for having reached the last quarter of deployment is being able to be cheek to cheek with the suck. This me and the suck together, saying cheese. What a cute couple we make.

And goddamn it, I know in a week I'll be riding the high of a new month. I know it as sure as I'm sitting here. I'll forget this moment ever happened, except for the fact that I wrote about it. But right now I'm in it and I hate it.

Memorial Day

2009-05-25T12:07:00.000-07:00

I spent much of Memorial Day trying to pretend that it wasn't. I didn't want to write about it. I still don't. Weeks in advance I was trying out different Memorial Day posts in my head, knowing that it would be expected of me, to write about it.

To be quite honest, I wish I could go back to the way it used to be. I remember the little parade up through the town center to the cemetery at the edge of the lake. The cemetery was built on a gently rising slope and was a good vantage point for watching the fire works on the 4th of July, especially as the bright bursts would be reflected in the still water of the lake.

On Memorial Day, the veterans would walk by and many of them would be people I knew. It was right and good, I thought, that the men should walk so proudly in their varying uniforms, different wars, different branches of the military. It was summer's rite of passage, it was part of the pomp and circumstance of life.

Now when I think of cemeteries, I think of the picture I saw on another blog, of a young widow stretched out against the grass as though she could press her body to her dead lover's through all the dense layers of soil, and whispering into the headstone.

The cemetery of my childhood was small, easily circumferenced. Age had gentled it, spread lichen over the stones, the grass was dense and mossy. Winding stone walls loosely encircled it, hinting at the sheep that once had pastured there.

It is nothing like the cemeteries that are hundred of acres, all of them with countless harsh white stones and looking at them, it is impossible not to realize that entire generations of people had disappeared into them. The weight of the dead is a cumbersome one to carry; it's not unexpected that as a nation we chose to do so officially only once a year, for one moment, at three in the afternoon.

The cemetery of my childhood is nothing like the cemeteries raw with wounds from receiving the constant flow of dead from our current wars. The families that meet there are no different from ours. Last summer, those families were experiencing a quite different sort of gathering; they probably talked about summer vacation, college plans, the best garden fertilizer and the price of gas.

And maybe next summer they'll do so again, only this time they'll also talk about the unseen presence; the open wound that closed in the grass of the cemetery but has yet to in their hearts. After all, their beloved missing died so that the front line could be kept far away from the rest of us, so that we wouldn't lose any more of our city skylines, so that we could celebrate the summer.

Cooking Smells and Memories

2009-05-22T16:14:00.000-07:00

Keith called last night. He's been calling a lot more often lately. He can't ever talk very long and usually just needs to say that he is missing me terribly and thinking about me a lot. Before I can think of what to say in reply to this; what do you say when you have said, "I love you so much" and "I miss you so much" a hundred million times and now the sound of them is like fingernails down the chalk board and all you want to do is hold that person in your arms and say those things without words, over and over again? Before I can say much of anything, he must go.

I spent much of this morning reading over a series of e-mails I sent to a friend throughout the course of last summer. I also spent hours looking at pictures and I read some of the first few e-mails that I sent Keith at the beginning of deployment.

When I was going through the pictures, I kept coming across random videos I had taken of him, and then I got the very first one I ever took, one of the last mornings on our camping trip up in the mountains.

"I should never 'a shown you how to use that," Keith says in the video, his voice rueful, grinning. He is driving and the early morning sun is making shadows across his face and arms. He drives with casual competence, with one arm; he keeps looking toward me and when he does, his face falls into shadow.

"But these'll be precious memories," I protest, but I am laughing so much I don't make a very good case of it.

"I give you some precious memories," he retorts with a wicked grin, turning to me and the sun catches on his eyes lashes.

I remembered that morning after three days without showering and how we took turns holding open the door of the outhouse for each other, keeping watch for spiders and moths. Now there is the very definition of intimacy.

I read my first e-mails to Keith after he left and felt all over again the sharp pain that edged every single thing I did those first few weeks, and the dull pain that underlined it, as though I had sustained internal bruising.

"This is going to sound silly," I had written to a friend of mine, a week into it. "But this is much harder than I had anticipated."

There was thunder in the clouds outside the open window, and ground beef browning on the stove when Keith called this afternoon. I was in the middle of making chili, hoping to cheer myself up with the cooking and rich smells. My phone was buttoned into my back pocket and I was twisting around like a dog chasing its tail in the kitchen trying to get at it.

"Sweetie!" I exclaimed, breathless, when I finally got the phone free. I told him how I had spent the day so far. "Do you remember the first time I make you lasagna?" I asked him.

I could remember, vividly. The incredible way it smelled, the golden brown mozzarella across the top and the way the red sauce bubbled up at the sides. There was a little saucepan of French cut green beans on the stove top, cooked in butter, salt and pepper because Keith loved it that way.

Keith and one of his soldiers came inside in time to see me take the lasagna out bundled so deeply in its oval casserole dish. I was ever so careful, trying to get a good grip on the side with the bulky oven mitts. Their eyes went wide, they ate most of it at one sitting. Keith kept kissing me.

"This is the best thing I've ever ate," he declared. "We'll never go to the Olive Garden again. Waste of money." When I got up to get something, he snagged me around the waist with his arm and pulled me in close to him, kissed me. I got pretty good at cooking lasagna last summer.

We traded shared memories for a little bit, I felt oddly close to tears and wondered if Keith would recognize the gathering thickness in my voice. I didn't want him to know.

"We've been through so much," I said in sudden wonder, remembering the chaos and pain of pre deployment, the first e-mails, the weight of months. I had to swallow the tears back.

"I've been thinkin' the same thing lately," he said in a low voice.

"Remember you have pictures of me in a string bikini on your hotmail account," I reminded him, before he had to go.

"I know," he said in a voice suddenly shy and adorable. "I just know if I see them, I'm gonna miss you so bad I'll go crazy."

"I have to go, I should get a coupla' hours sleep," he said later, reluctant. "I'll call you tomorrow."

"I'll be here," I said simply.

Cheering Up

2009-05-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like fitting into a teeny tiny, brown print bikini to get a girl's spirits up and boy do I fit into it! I went and tried some retail therapy yesterday, since it had been so, so long since I'd been shopping.

It didn't really work as well as I'd thought it would, but I did find the perfect summer dress at Target. It's very classic Greek style and light and floaty. Shopping at Target is always so hit or miss, some of their things I can't even recognize as clothing. Is it a shirt? A dress? A tunic? A shawl? Maybe all of the above. I have no idea.

The bikini was for Keith; I figured the next time he calls, if he's down, telling him that I purchased one would be guaranteed to please. Then he could spend all his free time day dreaming about going boating.

I know from prior experience that the sizes have no meaning on bikinis, so I simply gathered up every single size in both styles that I liked and headed to the fitting rooms for some serious pain in the ass. I was disappointed to realize that the size small top fit best. So that's where all the weight I lost came from. I don't have a figure up top anymore; I have only evidence that once, long ago, I might have.

I brought my Toby over to his new home yesterday, that was also contributing to it's being a very bad day in general. Even though his new home is spacious and full of everything a cat would desire; open windows, lots and lots of rooms to hide in and countless warm and appreciative laps to curl up on. It even has a garden with a fence tall enough that he can play in the garden and not get out. It's like kitty paradise.

But I still feel like a bad cat mom and was near tears many times yesterday. This morning I went downstairs and expected Toby to be there and getting in the way and wanting to eat some of my oatmeal, and it was just an empty room. I get home and struggle to close the door as quickly as possible so Toby doesn't sneak out, but there is no little grey cat under foot.

I also feel one step closer to the reality of moving. We have been pared down to the nuclear center; those remaining must all move on. In the meantime, I can visit my little guy every time I go to work and in six months, the transition will be complete. He's already every body's darling there.

Turning Point

2009-05-20T19:36:00.000-07:00

I realized something today, thank God. The thing about going through a deployment, or anything difficult, is that it becomes absolutely necessary to live in the exact moment that you are given. To step out of the moment causes everything that you have been given to be traded up for everything you wish you had. And it's a poor trade.

All today I was thinking about how it would feel if Keith were a civilian and he came to me and said, "Honey, I must go on a business trip. I have to leave in a few days and I'll be gone until August."

And then how devastated I would be. There goes our entire summer, I would think. What about all those barbecues? What about the fourth of July at my parent's? What about lying in the dark listening to the thunderstorm from the open windows of our bedroom? Or the smell of lake water on your skin, or taking turns putting on the aloe vera lotion after we've both turned as red as lobsters? What about all the love we would never make in that slow and sultry way in a warm, half lit evening while the fan whirled away? What about those things?

If he told me, "Don't worry, hun, it's just until August," I would not be comforted.

And that's if he were going somewhere like Cincinnati or Milwaukee. We could make plans to meet for a long weekend, maybe on the 4th. Make the most of it, get a nice hotel. I would look forward to it on the first week with out him, when I would be miserable thinking of the other nine long weeks I would be without him.

Then I switched up the scenario. I thought, what if he came to me and said, "Hun, I have to go on a business trip to the Middle East. I'll be in so much danger that I'll be paid hundreds of dollars more per month because of the risk to my life, but we'll be able to pay off the credit cards!

"Oh, and I need you to become my POA in case anything happens here because you have to take care of it; I won't be able to. You won't be able to reach me, you'll have to make the best decision you can. We need to review my will in case I die over there and I want you to give this to my mother and this to my brother and this to my father if I do die. Don't worry, I've bought additional life insurance, in case of death or dismemberment. You'll be fine; it's only until August."

Would I be comforted, knowing that he had only ten weeks of putting his life on the line? Would it console me to know that I would still be using the same bottle of conditioner by the time he came home, that the leaves that are on the trees will be on them still when he returns?And when we had reached the end of one week, would I think, "One week down and he is still alive and well; nine weeks to go?"

What has happened to my serenity? I turned away for one moment; I looked down and I saw that all along I was walking a tight rope across an abyss so wide I could not see the edge I had started from. And that at any moment I could lose everything that matters. I have been over this abyss for months and months and months; it has always been there and the exhaustion of ignoring it has worn down into me.

Now I am nearly to the other side and my legs are shaking, from the strain and the fear of being this close and not making it. I am beginning to wonder if there is no way for me to regain the oblivion that sheltered me for so long. I will have to in some way make my peace with fear. I have to stop wishing for what is not real.

What is real, for one, is Keith himself. He is real and he wears my ring on his left hand. This house, so quiet and warm, is real. The two girls are real, the cooling weather, the keyboard under my fingers.

The fear is also real, but it does not undo everything else that is. It's just a dark shadow that I must not focus on. There is no reason for the fear to define the proportions of my life and it will not, even though it will be, I suspect, my close companion for the rest of this journey.

Is there, I was wondering today, any reason in particular why I must continue to gain character? Why should this be necessary? Am I not already passable, at least? I mean, sure, I could use a little improvement, why not, but a deployment? Was that really necessary?

Whatever possesses us to engage life at this level, at the level where it is deeply uncomfortable? How and when do we learn that to turn away from the pain is to ultimately short change ourselves? Today I wished to raise my hand, to say, "Excuse me? I wish to be excused from class today. I need a hall pass."

But I couldn't. This is the life I was given, it is this moment that I'm living right now. I don't have another one available. And I can either choose to live fully, right now in this space, or to check out and miss something that I will never get back again. And I decided long ago, for right or wrong, that I would never live like that, like a ghost in my own life; I have far, far too much to be grateful for.

Over There

2009-05-20T07:56:00.000-07:00

I'm stuck down here in the middle of the month. The first half always flies by so effortlessly and it's with joy that I see the days flip by, one by one by one. And then the bottom half gets all bogged down and drags. By the time the new month has arrived, I feel exhausted.

I kept thinking of Keith all day and night. It doesn't help that he is right now doing the most dangerous thing that he has in the entire deployment. It doesn't help that he is the type of man to tell me so, straight up and then to ask for more prayer. It weighs on me. I haven't talked about it, because I haven't wanted to draw attention to it. And I was doing pretty good ignoring it until I heard his tone of voice yesterday.

I know he has reserves of endurance and strength that I can't begin to imagine and that he has been in many ways conditioned to what he is going through. His first deployment was far worse; he spent three months straight in his tank, eating nothing but turkey MREs. To this day he can't stand turkey and won't eat it. We will never have a turkey dinner for Thanksgiving.

When he did get orders to come back in and arrived at a FOB that served hot food, he and his crew went straight there without washing up or changing their uniforms. The guards at the canteen took one look at them with their wild eyes and said nothing.

Keith got all the way through the line until he reached the pizza. Now, Keith has a thing for pizza. When he got home from R&R, we ate pizza four nights out of the seven. We ate pizza on our first date. One of our best memories is of making pizza at home. So, even though his tray was loaded with other good things, this was the mecca.

However, he was so exhausted and tense that his hands were shaking. When he reached for the pizza, his tray over balanced and everything slipped off and fell to the floor. As he was telling me this story, when he got to this part he turned to me and his eyes were full of depth.

"It took everything I had not to eat the food off the floor," he said quietly.

Instead, he cleaned everything up and went to the back of the line. The second time through, he kept a firm grip with both shaking hands on the tray at all times, ate too much and got sick later on.

I have an excellent imagination, but it is very hard for me to imagine what his life is like right now. When I try, I see heat and a vast jumble of canvas tents spreading out for miles and metal boxes and the days and nights tupsey turvy and broken sleep and long, trudging marches in the unrelenting heat and confusion and noise and insects and dust and grime everywhere.

The phones are somewhere far away, he has a hard time getting money out of his account, his cell phone does not work, the Internet is far away in a different direction. Everything seems to be sprawled out and overcrowded; it makes the simplest of tasks complicated.

Despite this, when he calls he is usually cheerful and affectionate, or determined with a fierce pride in what he does that shines through and makes his complaints about the difficulties sound more like bragging about accomplishments. This is very reassuring to me.

When his voice comes across all ragged and colorless, so thick with exhaustion that I almost can't recognize him, it is alarming. He sounded beaten down. And then in turn the house feels empty and closed in; I pace around, searching for some kind of distraction and finding nothing.

He'll call me again, either today or tomorrow and be his usual self and everything will return to normal. But I just want to be done with this stupid deployment. I don't want anymore ups and downs. I want a slow, steady return to normal. I want him on a long, even descent to the landing strip. I don't want anythng upsetting things, not this close to the end, not when we are almost there.

Phone Connection

2009-05-19T16:49:00.001-07:00

Today it rained, a heavy, thundering downpour that rattled the windows and caused the smell of wet pavement to rise into the air. I can still hear it, the gurgling in the drainpipes. The house is full of blue light.

Keith called. He was calling from what must have been a land line, so I could actually hear his voice pretty well. He sounded terrible, but at first he was all business so I was afraid to ask him what was wrong. Finally I did and apparently he's had a really bad day and couldn't talk about it.

I don't know if it was the phone connection; maybe he's sounded like this before and I hadn't caught it? But it broke my heart. He sounded so much older than he really is. He's only twenty nine. His voice held the exhaustion and fortitude of someone much, much older.

I was literally wracking my brains to think of something to cheer him up when I thought of the utility bill. He has installed all energy star efficient appliances in the house, including the air conditioner and the heater, so he's always excited to see how low the bill is and this month it was the lowest in a long time-the heater has been off for weeks now.

"Guess what, Sweetie!" I exclaimed, leaping up from my perch on the stairs and going to the cluttered bill counter. "The utility bill came in! It was only XX amount!" I waved it around in the air as though he could see it.

And oh, thank God, he laughed. It was a tired laugh, but genuine for all that. "That's pretty good, you little kitten," he said.

And then I thought of how crazy with excitement Abby had gone when she came across Toby the cat in the cat carrier. Toby was on his way to the vet, poor guy. Abby thought that having the cat contained in a small carrier was the absolute best thing in life ever. Her body literally went all rigid with focus. It was as though she had cornered a prize duck, all on her own.

I explained this to Keith and this time he actually really did laugh and then he let out his breath in a long rush. I could hear the stress draining from his body. But all day today I have been wandering around, worried about him. And feeling vaguely guilty that I am so happy and have such a good life.

Even though I know good and well that Keith loves to think of me enjoying our house and if he knows that I am happy and contented that it goes a long way toward him feeling the same. I just wish there were something else I could do. I just want him home so I can actually hold him in my arms and give him a thousand kisses and feed him.

-Summer-

2009-05-18T16:50:00.001-07:00

Summer has cracked open like a malachite-
Saturated green from one edge to the other.
Making everywhere inviting, promising
deviled eggs, chocolate layer cake and love.
The ice cream truck sends its siren song loose
In the backwater neighborhoods and young
Love in body piercings walks hand and hand,
Leavings soapy scents of strawberry at least
A yard or so behind.

The birds are bold and the fragile fragments
of their eggs sink slowly into the grass. Women
receive summer catalogues with dread, plan out
tightly scheduled diets as detailed as any general’s
campaign.

Cantaloupe are three for a dollar and the milky, bruised
Yellow of summer squash are piled high and sold cheap.
They are taken home and grilled. Geraniums become
Impulse purchases, they ride home in back seats full of sun,
Twirl slowly on back porches or front steps.

In the evening, the cries of the children gathered in
Are heard against the still and bluing air. They protest,
They stall, they bargain with devilish skill and then,
Wailing, disconsolate, they are taken in to baths
And then to bed, where they throw the sheets off
and dream in the lilac scented night; the crickets
keep them good company.

A Mishmash Post

2009-05-18T11:23:00.000-07:00

There is a difference between chunk light tuna and solid white albacore, my friends, and it is worth the extra dime. That is the lesson I have learned today. It has been one of those days.

I awoke from a dream of intergalactic warfare on a miniature, though tragic scale. It was barely six o'clock in the morning and the dogs were tussling on the rug at the foot of the bed. No sooner had I dragged my butt down the stairs to eject them into the great Back Yard than my cat decided to follow me back upstairs yowling.

When I crawled back into bed, a whiff of my dream returned to me, as it sometimes does, but I could no longer remember it very well. I just knew many small warriors had given their lives for a good cause, taken down by cannibalistic aliens in a fire of sparks. (I should have known better than to eat right before sleeping.)

At eight thirty I was suddenly and completely awake and the air of the upstairs bedroom was already warm and stale. I felt irritable and disorganized; I knew there were many practical tasks ahead of me that day and I hate practical tasks.

We cannot take our cat with us on our move. We could, but we (and by we, I mean Keith) have decided not too. I am ambivalent about this decision; I rarely have time for poor Toby anymore and feel guilty about neglecting him. On the other hand, I promised him he would have a home for the rest of his life when I adopted him. To give him away again would mark me forever as a Bad Person.

It turns out work may have a place for him, among those with advanced dementia. I went wild with joy at the prospect and now am in the bitter grip of fear that something will happen to prevent this perfect solution.

Consequently, I was on a mission to track down his records. This involved many calls to several different vets and anxiety about how much everything will cost. And where the hell did my cat carrier go to? And should I buy one just to transport him? Or should I borrow one, but from whom? I hate decisions, they are like mosquitoes and the smaller they are, the more annoying.

I made coffee to soothe myself, but this only reminded me that I was running short of coffee. And dog food and bananas and milk. There was a check I needed to deposit. Off I went, driving first a long way in one direction to the bank and then back another long way to get groceries.

None of the songs on the radio were what I wanted to hear. I didn't notice a blinking school zone and never slowed down for it, thus becoming a Bad Citizen. When I got home I was hot to the touch from having stewed in the little metal box of a car.

To top it all off, a letter came in the mail today from the dental insurance which seems to be saying that they aren't going to pay as much as the dental office had said they would. But I can't be sure, because insurance bills employ a type of English that is not taught in the public school system, it is closely akin to The Black Speech and one does not speak it aloud in case it catches Sauron's attention.

-For those of you who did not grow up thinking that Middle Earth had a genuine place in human history, The Black Speach is a language Tolkien make up for his character Sauron and those who lived in Mordor to speak.

In case you were wondering, I was the girl that had created a dictionary of Elvish, both High and Low, and was in the process of laboriously teaching myself the language. I was also the girl who read the Silmarillion at the open window aloud by the light of a summer evening.-

Into my messy, broken egg kind of day came a call from my husband. Thank God for his firm and practical grip on reality. He dismissed the dental insurance mix up, certain that it would work out and if it didn't, we would have enough to pay for it. He had an equally calm attitude toward the cat's situation.

There was even time to tell him about my epic battle against a moth. I don't mind any other of creature in this wild, wild Kingdom. I do sometimes question the necessity for the centipede, but am willing to accept. Ants, worms and beetles I can hold in my hand. But a moth will have me undone in a moment.

One of my worst nightmares as a child involved a moth. My grandparents had an old, rusty truck half way up the track to the backwoods garden. In my dream I was playing there, during a scorched and hazy summer day when I looked down to see a large, fuzzy moth clinging to my tee shirt.

Revulsion suffused my soul. I could not take the shirt off, it would bring the creature too close to my face. I could not squash it, that was unthinkable. I would have to touch it. (I shudder with horror just to write the nightmare out, twenty years later.)

Gingerly, I placed my fingers on the soft, fuzzy body of the creature and tugged. It would not come loose. I pulled harder, it stretched the fabric of my shirt out like a tent when suddenly its fuzzy body burst in my fingers. It woke me straight up and I had to go back into the nightmare and make up how it ended, which is what I would do to calm myself after the very worst of them.

Poor moths. Others have described them poetically, soft white forms in the twilight. They are harmless and of scientific interest. People happily hunt them with nets and used to display them with pins.

I, on the other hand, do the terrified dance (you know, the quick, mincing steps while wringing one's hands and squealing.) Oh, how I longed for Keith! Throughout the entire deployment, never until that very moment did I so need him.

It had alighted upon the bedside lamp shade. I could not ignore it. Who knew where it might go in the night? It might brush against my cheek, crawl into the covers, bumble about in the dark. It had to be killed.

The dogs were no help, Abbie looked at me with her warm, brown eyes. She did not know the "Eat Moth" command. Finally I thought of my husband's spider killer under the kitchen sink.

So, picture this. There is a girl in blue and white stripped flannel PJs bathed in the warm glow of a lamp. She is hopping about and shuddering with horror, she clutches the spray can to her chest and takes a deep breath. Hands shaking, she directs the can toward a calm and unsuspecting moth.

The can sprays, she squeals and dances backward, the moth does a death agony against the base of the lamp, where it is sprayed again and then falls to the carpet between the bedside table and the wall. There it dies in oblivion.

The entire rest of the night I slept uneasily, wondering if it wasn't actually dead and would craw up the bed skirt and into bed with me, or across my pillow with decaying body dragging.

Dear God, save me from the consequences of my own imagination, for they are immense.

True Confessions of an Army Wife

2009-05-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

Keith got his orders. We will be reporting to a new duty station by December.

He called to tell me this on a Sunday, when I was behind the receptionist desk, trying to figure out the tangled web of which mother and grandmother were going with family and which were going to church; kind of like resident tug-o-war. The church volunteer, in her zeal, appropriated Mother and took her off to church while I was calling Daughter to be sure this was actually suppose to happen. (It was.)

"I have some news," he said, in this Voice. The voice, along with the fact that he never calls on a Sunday anymore and had just called me for our usual talk just a day before, combined in such a way as to make my stomach queasy. What news; what dread news could this be?

"I drew orders for such and such a state," he said.

And oh, how I did love that state in that moment! That state was a joy, a delight to my heart! That state was my best friend! My delight melted away most of his trepidation; it turns out his Voice was due to his dread that I would flip out over not being able to stay here.

I hung up the phone and the world was transformed. Several things coalesced for me in that moment. One, I realized that I really, truly was an Army wife. The Army had called and I would follow; I must follow. I was being moved. I would learn more lingo; duty station, for example.

I would supervise the packing of the household goods and keep lists of what was in each one and what room they would go in. I would be organized and decisive, I would be like a pioneer woman heading off into the hazy distance with her husband by her side, their few wordly possessions in the wagon behind them, with nothing but their courage and determination.

Or something along those lines. Also, in that moment I went from young adult to adult. For ten years I have been basically rootless, wandering at will. But now I had cast my lot in completely with another; I had grown up.

I realized that even though I had left childhood a long time ago, I had kept the door open and had been standing on the threshold, where I could see down into both worlds. With the news that we would be moving, I felt the door swing gently shut. There was a rightness in this feeling, I felt complete and at peace. I could look down into my childhood and troubled early adulthood with a new and gracious perspective. I was free now to move forward into the future.

The rest of the day passed in a haze as I felt this transformation continue inside of myself. I rarely ever call people on the phone; that day I called five or so people to tell them the news. I felt like I had to, in order to make it even more real to me.

When I returned to the house, it had changed. Something had gone out of it. I was fond of the house, I always would be, but I no longer really lived there. Somebody else would cut the grass, would chat with good neighbor Larry over the fence.

All of this caused me to remember with great vividness my first few impressions of Army life; especially the spouses. I remembered when he was issued some new equipment a few weeks before he deployed. The tailgate of the truck was down, the garage door was open; it was a bright, sunny afternoon. All his new gear was scattered over the tailgate.

There was some sort of new carrying pouch for ammunition; it involved a lot of interwoven nylon straps. I bent my fingers to this task with intense concentration, aware that I was putting together with my own hands something he would wear in the field.

He was trying to figure out this new piece of equipment that was meant to protect the back of his neck, below the helmet. I looked up to see him trying it on in front of the mirror.

"It feels comfortable," he muttered to himself, satisfied.

I felt a surge of primal rage. I literally saw red. I realized that in all the years up until it was just now issued, soldiers had gone into battle without it, and died. What other gaps were still overlooked? Secondly, how was such a tiny piece of equipment suppose to safeguard my husband's life? He seemed oblivious to this; his only concern whether or not it was irritating to wear.

I understood suddenly the stories of Army wives going berserk at FRG meetings, storming into company commander's offices, the result being that their men back in the sand box got called into other offices and chewed out. The wife who had done this had told me this story herself, while her husband helped Keith with the arrangement of his class As before the Promotion Board.

I remember looking at her and realizing that my mouth had dropped open. One, that she would have those kind of cahones. Two, that she appeared proud of having gotten her husband into trouble and three, that her behavior could get him in trouble; this meant of course, that Keith would in turn be held responsible for me. Dear god, I thought. What have I gotten myself into.

I was terrified of this woman; unfortunately, being the first Army wife that I had any real contact with, she then formed the basis of my conception of them. I visualized other Army wives as being tough, strong, abrasive and tenacious; all of them not afraid to voice their opinion, getting involved in company politics and storming about, writing letters to Congressmen and organizing group action.

It didn't help that she was kind to my face and then talked bad about me behind my back. It was my first taste of this sort of thing and I felt deeply betrayed, shocked. I wondered why she didn't like me; what had I said wrong? Had I dressed wrong? What negative consequences would this have for my husband, who reported to her husband?

Except that we weren't married at this time, and neither she nor her husband thought Keith should marry me. They publicly called him out at a barbecue I had not attended, due to work, calling him stupid for moving so fast into a relationship with me. They feared that I was in some way using him. They warned him not to marry me, they warned him above all not to get me pregnant.

Keith had a very good friend that he felt responsible for and we would often stop by their house. The men had been through an earlier deployment together; it has fused this bond that there were no words for. His wife constantly acted toward me as though I were trying to marry Keith for his money and would try to either warn me or brush me off.

Many times I wanted to sit down with her, woman to woman, and say in a very straight forward and common sense kind of way, "Look, I gave up a very lucrative position in management and broke a very expensive lease on my apartment in order to come down here and marry Keith. Money is in no way motivating me. If I had been interested in a man solely based on his financial worth, I would have married the man who had a PhD and owned a three hundred thousand dollar house with tennis rackets and a jacuzzi tub in an upscale suburban neighborhood. But I didn't marry him, I'm going to marry Keith, and I'm going to marry Keith because I love him. It really quite simple."

Obviously, we never did have this conversation.

Looking back, I guess it's no wonder I never felt comfortable on post or in my role as Army wife; I didn't fit the picture that was presented to me. The other Army wives I met were ten years or so younger than I was, already with their first child; the way they spoke and moved brought back images of High School.

Keith had invited them and their men to a barbecue at the house. I felt as though I were simultaneously an Aunt figure and a novice. They were very nice, friendly girls and I liked them, but I had no idea how to talk to them. I couldn't tell if they were being friendly to me because of Keith's rank or because they actually liked me.

They admired my kitchen, the appliances; I hadn't lived there long enough to really feel as if it was mine to begin with, so I was shy about the attention. We all did shots together, secretly stealing the liquor away from the men. When one husband found out, he was really and truly angry; there was a scene and I was very uncomfortable, amazed that they would argue so publicly.

I met other Army wives when I went with Keith to a poker night. I dreaded this and did not want to go; Keith begged me to. He wanted to show me off. We'd been married only a few days; hardly anyone had met me and there was a lot of intense curiosity. We made a deal; I would go only if Keith gave his word that we would leave at twelve on the dot.

"Answer questions directly," he instructed me, as we were driving there. "Don't try to draw attention to yourself and don't get involved in the bullshitting; you're in with the Big Boys now."

"And why am I going?" I asked tersely. "You're not making this easier."

"You'll be fine," he said.

I was so terrified going up the front steps of the house that it was difficult to focus on anything. We were met by a large party of young people who were heading out unexpectedly to pick up a relative at the airport.

The women were young and dressed in tight and bright clothing. Their eyes swept over me, assessing and then away, dismissing. I wore washed out, boot legged jeans and a soft pink tee shirt with cap sleeves and a scooped neck; my long hair was down and I wore thin framed, oval glasses that kept slipping down the bridge of my nose; I was clearly no threat.

I was taken out to the back porch where I was introduced to an entire group of young, lounging men. I was assessed in a completely different way and they attempted to make casual conversation with me. It was difficult to think of how to respond, it took all my concentration not to hide behind Keith's bulky frame. I could tell by their confused expressions that they were trying to figure out if I was stupid or just socially inept.

Keith, on the other hand, was like a fish in water. He wore his black cowboy hat and sagging jeans, steel toed boots and a ripped tee shirt. He casually turned his head and spit over the railing, he bullshitted with great confidence and comfort, with a never ending steam of the worst sort of profanity.

We sat around the table in the dining room; the walls were bare and white, small clots of hyper children surged and retreated like the tide; their mothers scolded loudly or ignored. The light shown down harshly, every one but me had a beer. The chips were counted, the card were dealt.

I was sitting very close to Keith, my hand covering my mouth, watching everything silently. The men were huge and powerful from the inside out, rough around the edges; dangerous. They were all NCOs but one, they were like sharks, powerful and barely controlled; they insulted one another continuously, effortlessly. Keith fit right in; I realized this was his natural habitat.

Many of the women played. I could tell the women in this particular group had fallen into two camps; they had either decided to join the men, bullshitting and insulting like the best of them, or had somehow found a way to be themselves in the midst of it. Only one woman had found out how to do the latter option, she was older and serenely pregnant, good natured and good humored. Her husband was the senior NCO in the room. It was their house.

The other women couldn't play the game as well as the men and kept getting the raw end of the deal. They appeared inured to this. They appeared to me to have incredibly tough skin.

Keith played poker with some kind of casual brilliance; he never seemed to be focused on the cards or even to be watching them. His hand gestures were abrupt, smooth; the brim of the hat shaded his eyes, he never let up on the unending stream of insults and observations that had nothing to do with the cards. And yet he raked in more and more chips, stacking them in tall columns by his elbow.

This pissed off several people around the table; one girl got burned and said to her husband apologetically, "I can't read him," and then to Keith, puzzled, "I can't read you."

"It's ok, hun," Keith said, with unexpected gentleness. "It's just the cards."

The young man beside Keith got burned and started a line of insults that were something quite different from the usual background noise. The men all sharpened their attention; I sensed a certain kind of tenseness in Keith, a readiness. A few more insults later and Keith stood and immediately the other men intervened; the young man stopped the insults but stewed away to himself.

It came closer and closer to twelve; I was continually watching the clock, counting down each minute that I had to stay in this overheated, unstable hell of an environment. I had completely given up caring what anyone thought of me; I knew I had made a terrible impression and I gave it up as a lost cause. I simply didn't fit in and never would.

Keith seemed oblivious to this, he was clearly delighted that I was there. Besides, he wasn't showing off so much how I looked as how I behaved. He had guessed exactly how I would react, he had been counting on it. No one, he knew, had guessed that the broad that had squirmed into his life in so startling and permanent a manner would turn out to be a soft spoken, incredibly shy young woman who sat quietly and didn't drink.

At one point he tilted his head toward me, a wordless invitation to kiss and my body knew his so well that I responded as though this were a conversation I knew by heart.

"Cut it out," said one of the men casually, with a dry amusement. "There are married people here."

When the clock hit twelve, I leaned forward and put my mouth to Keith's ear; he inclined his head receptively.

"It's twelve," I said with unbridled relief.

"Hun," he said gravely, "I can't just leave, not when I've won all this money; it wouldn't look right. I have to give them a chance to get it back. I didn't tell them at the beginning that I had to leave at twelve."

I figured he must be telling the truth, it seemed to make sense, but I was so crushed.

"You gave your word," I whispered back. I couldn't bear at that moment to argue publicly; I wanted no one to know.

"Give me one more hour," he whispered back. "I'll tell the men right now they have an hour."

This is what happened, he announced that he had made a deal with me and had to leave in one hour.

"We all have bosses," said the senior NCO dryly.

The hour went by with excruciating slowness. At one point, the soldier on my other side attempted to flirt with me. I looked at him in stunned amazement. Did he know my husband at all? What could he possibly be thinking? He put his hand on my thigh for a moment and I looked down at it and then back up at him. My face must have been a study.

I knew I was being a poor sport; I should engage in the game, it was considered harmless. I don't know how I knew that, it just seemed to be that way. But I also knew that Keith loved me with as much abandon as he did because, in part, he knew I could not, and indeed did not know how to play this particular sport and his trust was all that mattered to me. Everyone else was a stranger that I might never see again.

I stonily ignored the man for most of the evening. His eyes sometimes fell on me with troubled sadness, a soft rebuke. "Why?" he seemed to be asking. Later on in the evening I took pity on him and we talked, but because I had drawn the lines so clearly, he did not try again to flirt.

The hour passed by and Keith said that he had to play three more hands. I knew that he was pulling my leg now, that he was trying to see what he could get away with. I considered and decided to give him one more hand and to pull the plug at the second one. I did not tell him this. I decided that I would make a public scene if he refused; it was now one am and I would behave like a fish wife in the market place if I had to.

He played that hand and I pulled the plug. He argued, I stood firm. He pleaded, I refused. Everyone watched. I ignored them. He got sulky; I didn't care. We took our leave, the other men were not impressed with me. I said goodbye with impunity; they could think what they liked, I would never go to another poker game with Keith.

And I did not, even though he wanted me to, very much.

"Have you forgotten what it was like the first time?" I asked him, amazed. "Do you remember the huge argument we got into because I made you leave?"

Either he didn't remember or he didn't care, but I didn't go. I gathered my initial impressions of Army wives from these interactions. Eventually though, I had the pleasure of meeting other Army wives that did not fit the mold that these experiences had made in my mind.

"Don't worry," said one, when she invited me out. "We don't do drama."

My eyes widened, her statement was both a confirmation and a relief. When we went out, it was true. The girls were younger than I, but they were gracious and dignified, or quirky and sweet. They had come to terms with the Army life. I never knew what rank their men were and it didn't matter.

We bonded over the common experience of deployment, care packages and R&R plans. We spoke the common language.

Through blogging, I found a whole other world of Army wives and Military wives and breathed in a long, deep sigh of relief. I was not alone. There were lots of other wives just like me, who were proud of their men, proud of their country and yet remained themselves.

And now I am going deeper into the territory; I will be more absorbed into it. But I'm not as afraid anymore. I understand there are as many different kinds of Army wives as there are women and I can make a place for myself within the culture. Hell, I might even buy a sticker for my car.

Summer Classes for Men

2009-05-12T09:40:00.000-07:00

(One of my besties sent this to me and I thought it was too absolutely hilarious not to share.)

Summer Classes for Men at

THE ADULT LEARNING CENTER

REGISTRATION MUST BE COMPLETED

By Friday, June 29th 2009

NOTE: DUE TO THE COMPLEXITY AND DIFFICULTY LEVEL

OF THEIR CONTENTS, CLASS SIZES WILL BE LIMITED TO 8 PARTICIPANTS MAXIMUM

Class 1

How To Fill Up The Ice Cube Trays--Step by Step, with Slide Presentation.

Meets 4 weeks, Monday and Wednesday for 2 hours beginning at 7:00 PM.

Class 2

The Toilet Paper Roll--Does It Change Itself? Round Table Discussion.

Meets 2 weeks, Saturday 12:00 for 2 hours.

Class 3

Is It Possible To Urinate Using The Technique Of Lifting The Seat and Avoiding The Floor, Walls and Nearby Bathtub?--Group Practice.

Meets 4 weeks, Saturday 10:00 PM for 2 hours.

Class 4

Fundamental Differences Between The Laundry Hamper and The Floor--Pictures and Explanatory Graphics.

Meets Saturdays at 2:00 PM for 3 weeks.

Class 5

Dinner Dishes--Can They Levitate and Fly Into The Kitchen Sink?

Examples on Video.

Meets 4 weeks, Tuesday and Thursday for 2 hours beginning At 7:00 PM

Class 6

Loss Of Identity--Losing The Remote To Your Significant Other.

Help Line Support and Support Groups.

Meets 4 Weeks, Friday and Sunday 7:00 PM

Class 7

Learning How To Find Things--Starting With Looking In The Right Places And Not Turning The House Upside Down While Screaming.

Open Forum Monday at 8:00 PM, 2 hours.

Class 8

Health Watch--Bringing Her Flowers Is Not Harmful To Your Health.

Graphics and Audio Tapes.

Three nights; Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 7:00 PM for 2 hours.

Class 9

Real Men Ask For Directions When Lost--Real Life Testimonials.

Tuesdays at 6:00 PM Location to be determined

Class 10

Is It Genetically Impossible To Sit Quietly While She Parallel Parks?

Driving Simulations.

4 weeks, Saturday's noon, 2 hours.

Class 11

Learning to Live--Basic Differences Between Mother and Wife.

Online Classes and role-playing Tuesdays at 7:00 PM, location to be determined

Class 12

How to be the Ideal Shopping Companion

Relaxation Exercises, Meditation and Breathing Techniques.

Meets 4 weeks, Tuesday and Thursday for 2 hours beginning at 7:00 PM.

Class 13

How to Fight Cerebral Atrophy--Remembering Birthdays, Anniversaries and Other Important Dates and Calling When You're Going To Be Late. Cerebral Shock Therapy Sessions and Full Lobotomies Offered.

Three nights; Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 7:00 PM for 2 hours.

Class 14

The Stove/Oven-- What It Is and How It Is Used.

Live Demonstration.

Tuesdays at 6:00 PM, location to be determined.

Upon completion of any of the above courses, diplomas will be issued to the survivors.

Caught up in the Introspection

2009-05-07T11:54:00.000-07:00

Such is the nature of addiction: to be eating potato chips even though the very act of doing so causes pain and the only way to manage the eating of them is to nibble on them slowly, as a rodent would. Even so, in this way I have actually finished off two bags that were left over from when my brother visited.

The last few days I felt well enough to walk again. Seeing the houses and trees that line my route was like seeing the faces of good friends. Spring has long since ceased to be a private affair; it has gone exuberantly, shamelessly public.

There is a house along this route that I love so much I can hardly look at it straight. It is set on a corner lot, far back on the smooth edges of green lawn. On the front lawn a large, sturdy oak tree is growing and under its shade are set two lawn benches in wrought iron and wood. They are set a little crookedly, but this only serves to give them a friendly, approachable look.

On the table between the benches are straggly house plants that have barely survived winter and are now given up to the sunshine and fresh air to recuperate. There is an old Ford on the curb and a medium sized boat covered with a tarp on the other curb and a baby swing hanging under a tree.

I love this house so much because it is exactly what I imagine Keith and I will create, given enough time. (Except, I feel compelled to add, that the truck will be a Chevy.)

Yesterday evening I was sitting outside on the lawn, happily puttering away with a gardening tool. It was about seven by the clock, but the sun had yet to set and the light was a golden amber that shown almost horizontal across the grass, lighting up each individual blade, turning them translucent as jade.

I sat back on my heels and listened; a cricket was singing somewhere nearby, the first one I had heard since last fall. At his unmistakable voice, I was suddenly awash with nostalgia. I felt the wash of time running over me like a brook over river stones.

In quick succession, I felt the long, hot days of summer pass by, the endless, golden afternoons, the golden rod massed on the banks, the trees at the edge of the swamp turning a toasted brown and yellow, the dust rising up glittering in the sun by the side of the road. And then the end of summer, the turning over into Autumn.

And it amazed me that even though I want the end of summer, I want it terribly, because it will bring my husband back to me, at that moment I didn't feel joy; I felt deeply melancholy. Thirty one years worth of summers had sunk the meaning into the marrow of my bones: that the sound of the cricket brings in the fullness of the season and then its closing.

There are two little birch trees growing at the corner of the lawn where I was sitting, I saw them and then I saw them twenty years from now, grown wide and sturdy, sunk deep into the earth. I knew that I would see it; we don't plan on ever selling this house; when we move to another post, we will rent the house out.

When I saw the trees full grown, I felt grief wash over me and something like terror. I couldn't understand where the emotion was coming from and it was disturbing. (The moral of this story will be to avoid weeding the lawn during long, golden May evenings, as it can cause severe bouts of introspection; much safer to have stayed inside and watched "Wheel of Fortune.)

By then, what language will Keith and I speak that no one else will know? What scars will we carry that no one else will see? I could see myself, but I was a stranger. I could not imagine what I would have gone through by then, the testing grounds I would have weathered and the things that, like Mary, I would carry around, treasured, inside my heart.

And in order to be that woman, I will have to leave myself behind. When I reach that point, I will look back at myself, kneeling in the grass with the young trees, struck mute by the inevitability of the future and that girl will be a ghost. I will think fondly and tenderly of who I am now. I will want to reach out and assure her that everything will be fine, that I am stronger than I think and that above all, no matter what it brings, life is worth living.

There are a lot reason, I guess, why I should so suddenly have been dropped into introspection as though a stone into water. There are many different things slowly converging on me.

For one, I met Keith for the first time a year ago. Everything is like it was when I first met him, only he isn't here. This is mostly comforting but also sometimes a little eery. Songs on the radio that I heard that spring come back now as I drive. The leaves look the same, the light falls in the same way.

Also, and this may be hard to understand if one hasn't gone through a deployment; the end of the deployment is not effortless, it seems to me. It brings about huge changes, usually ones that cannot be very well anticipated and that cannot be very well controlled. I have had almost an entire year of remaining static. Sometimes this drove me crazy; most of the time it was my most vital support system.

Keith's return means that we may very well be posted elsewhere. He may change his MOS. Even if he does not, he will be trained to a different role, which will mean him going to an Army school who knows where. None of this is certain; Keith is not sure what he wants and won't be, I think, until he returns and returns to himself.

Before he even left, I knew that I would be receiving home a different person from the man I was sending off. Right now, he is under incredible stress. He is finally doing things he feels is worthwhile and with a group of soldiers that he fondly referred to as a "good crew."

However, there is the unrelenting tension of doing patrols, living in a crowd, not having contact with home often and working under conditions that I won't go into, except to say normally the Army has standards in place to prevent it, but in this company's case, it didn't work out so well.

Even when he came home for leave, he was so tense that I had to loudly announce myself whenever entering the garage or he would startle so bad it hurt to watch him.

"Do you want to kill me, woman?" he asked me once.

I will be receiving from Iraq a man who will desperately need somehow to release that tension. He will be ragged at the edges, the reservoirs of anger and frustration will lie just beneath the surface. I hear it in his voice even now, over the phone. He will be, I think, driven to reclaim his place and to make up for a lost year.

The first goal will be simple enough to accomplish; all I will need to do is to let go completely of all those things it had been my responsibility to arrange. It will be simple, but not easy. As for the latter goal, that will be impossible and until he realizes this and mourns the loss, I anticipate having very little in the way of peace. Looking at it in such clear terms is my way of preparing.

In the end, it doesn't matter what shape he will be in when he comes home. My job is very clear; I must be like the girl in the faerie tale who rescued her love from the Elven queen. She simply had to hold on no matter what shape he took, no matter if he snarled at her as vicious as a tiger, or burned like rod of glowing iron.

I have no doubt that I will be able to and also no doubt that it will hurt like hell. I am his front line and will receive the brunt while he is caught up in the storm of his own pent up emotion. And it's not that he doesn't love me enough not to; it's the opposite. He loves me so much that he will be unable to hold back. I am too close and too vital to escape whatever he is going through. This is what happened in the unrelenting stress before deployment and I am certain, what will happen afterward.

It is still three months away and I would have him home tomorrow if I could choose to. I can't, of course. Instead, I feel as if I am waiting in some quiet, sun filled antechamber. I am gathering my strength and clearing my mind in order to receive home the beloved tempest.

Eight Things

2009-05-05T12:31:00.000-07:00

I got tagged by Melissa over at New Girl on Post to do the Eight Things Meme that has been floating about the blogosphere. Thanks for the tag, Melissa, this was fun!

8 Things I Look Forward To...
#1.) Going mad along with other crazed women some time in mid August when the ceremony is over and or falling on my face while trying to run toward Keith.
#2.) No longer tasting at the back of my mouth nasty ooze from gums that are, I hope and pray, healing up.
#3.) Stuffing my face with crispy foods-it's amazing just how many foods are crispy. Grilled cheese is, and bacon. Chocolate chip cookies, even.
#4.) The end of May. (I know. I should appreciate May while May is here and I do. I love May. But I will love it more in retrospect, I'm sure.)
#5.) Reading the rest of "Cat's Eye" by Margaret Atwood, as this is a marvelous book and not at all about vanity as I had thought at the very beginning.
#6.) The unspecified date in the future when I will actually clean out the car.
#7.) Temperatures in the upper eighties. Mmmm. Heat.
#8.) Driving along somewhere in mid America, listening to the radio and feeling the wind on my face and knowing that we will stop for dinner somewhere soon and then find a place to camp and sleep in the bed of the truck, squashed together on the air mattress with the stars and the dark canopy of leaves above.

8 Things I Did Yesterday
#1.) Balanced on the edge of the curb at Village Inn while talking on the cell phone with Keith and telling him I missed his sweaty shirts. Ahh, the sweaty shirts! The damp cotton, the warmth, the smell of him.
#2.) Watched my brother and his young son from across the booth, amazed at how alike they are.
#3.) Sat on the lawn and weeded with my mom. (My lawn appears to be growing lettuces.)
#4.) Watched "Antiques Roadshow" with Mom and laughing uproariously at the feedback session at the end.
#5.) Watched the Rockies white with snow come rising crisp and sharp over the high, sloping edge of a green hill.
#6.) Discussed the meaning of Robert Frost's poem "A Prayer for Spring" with dear, resident poet Jack and laughing so much that my mouth hurt for hours afterward.
#7.) Kissed my dogs several hundred times and talked the worst kind of baby talk to them.
#8.) Stayed awake hour after hour after hour imagining the moment of meeting Keith and that night and the next day and the week later and then back to the moment of meeting him, and so on and so forth and suddenly it was five am and I hadn't slept at all.

8 Things I Love
#1.) Waking up in the morning with sunlight pouring in through the white, wooden blinds, knowing I will pad about lazily in bare feet, coffee in hand, watering my plants and blinking in the sun.
#2.) The fact that I don't call or write my best friends for weeks (and sometimes months!) and they remain, still, my best friends.
#3.) My dog Lynn's ability to read my mind.
#4.) The slowly gathering numbness of narcotics. Mmmm, Vicodin.
#5.) Hearing the cell phone ring and seeing "keith?" on the display.
#6.) The fact that I can surround myself with music at the touch of a button, at anytime, day or night. What luxury. Seriously. In what other age did people have this luxury?
#7.) The warm comfort of hugging my mom. She is most huggable.
#8.) Sleeping with the window open and hearing bird song at three am.

8 Things I Wish I Could Do:
#1.) Fly
#2.) Wish magically for a gallon of milk and have it appear without having to go fetch it from the grocery store.
#3.) Play the piano brilliantly.
#4.) Buy a plane ticket to Iraq, sneak into the back of a van, infiltrate Keith's FOB in the early morning hours and crawl into his sleeping bag with him. This wish has many different variations; it all ends the same way.
#5.) Sew darling little summer frocks.
#6.) Actually sit down and write the next damn chapter in my long neglected novel.
#7.) Speak ten languages fluently and work as a translater at the U.N., with a sophisticated flat in NY with a view of the park and wear understated, classic outfits to work with shoes that cost more than my car insurance and drink French martinis. (Next life? And Keith can be my sexy CIA agent husband from the Midwest, still with long eye lashes and drawling voice, copper colored hair and a taste for whiskey.)
#8.) Get pregnant in the first three months after Keith gets home, in order to give birth before his next deployment. But I'll take whatever comes.

8 Shows I watch:
#1.) Extreme Home Makeover. Watch out for this show; be prepared to bawl your eyes out.
#2.) The World News with Charles Gibson; mostly because when he says "Good night, and I hope you had a good day," I really believe that he does hope that and am flattered.
#3.) Dancing with the Stars, though it annoyed me that the fans don't allow the judges to criticize anyone. It's a competition, people. And I think Shawn Johnson is so cute.
#4.) That slightly corny Sherlock Holmes show on PBS.
#5.) Ummm.....I don't watch that much TV. I used to watch Celebrity Apprentice until Clint Black became maniacal and the tension got too much to handle.
#6.) Sometimes I watch Judge Judy on rainy or otherwise depressing afternoons, but invariably the shows makes it more depressing (how can people make those kind of choices, live those kind of lives?) and I end up turning it off.
#7.) The local news, affectionately nick named "Mistakes Are Us" that daily includes such entertainment as "wrong sound clip," "not turning the camera away from the poor newscasters," "wrong video clip," and "no picture at all," which is a particularly exciting one.
#8.) Oprah, if I can remember to turn it on at the right time.

I'm not going to tag anyone but I actually enjoyed doing this meme a lot, and would love to read others!

The Mysteries of Gardening

2009-04-30T09:23:00.000-07:00

All winter long there's been this non describe bush by the side of the house. It had sprouted some time before I met Keith and those long dead buds had petrified into hard, brown shells that clung on all through the winter. Last summer I had brutally cut it back. I didn't like; I didn't like the shape of the leaves or the spindly branches.

This spring it put out buds very, very early and for that I developed a fondness for the bush. Day after day I would watch the leaves slowly uncurling, revealing tightly packed buds. Over weeks, those buds have grown up, reaching for the sun and spreading out into a pattern that seemed familiar to me.

I cut away all the dead buds and waited until one morning when I went out and saw that the buds were distinctly purple and shaped like the tips of arrows, and that the leaves were thin, jade green and pointed at the ends. Yes. It was a lilac bush all along.

Memories of lilac bushes have sunk their roots deep into my childhood, the tumbled, tangled shelter they made under their branches, where the packed dirt of the bank was cool and smooth and the little birds fussed about in the green over head, the way they stood eight feet tall, it seemed and the scent of lilacs, which is pure heaven.

That is not the only surprise my yard has landed me with. The birch tree, instead of focusing on putting out leaves which I dearly desire it to do, instead wove bright silver mittens which it wore for a week or so. Then the mittens unravelled into long, thick skeins of silver wool that hung like tinsel from every branch and twig. Hundreds of them fell upon the new grass below, looking like nothing so much as a hundred fuzzy dead caterpillars in the yard.

I was not pleased.

"What on earth is my birch tree doing?" I asked Good Neighbor Larry, one lazy afternoon. I leaned upon a rake and watched the sprinkler make its light and airy arc over the grass.

"It's a female," he explained. "It's germinating."

Holy crap. Even my birch tree is getting it on. I went out to inspect it this morning, and there are bits of green showing through the leaf buds; soon it will put aside reproduction and flower into a thick, green canopy of leaves.

My herbs have survived an unexpected and savage attack on the part of Abigail, who was strangely attracted to the peat pots remains. The day I came home to find my newly potted cilantro out of the pot, and shaken nearly to bits, and left to die on the packed earth of the back yard, I let out what can only be described as a howl of rage. I didn't know those really happened, but they do, and let me tell you, they are not nice noises.

Abby went and hid under the porch and didn't come out for hours. I re potted the cilantro and it's making a very nice comeback and since then the girls have avoided the pots. The patches of lawn repair have finally, finally sprouted grass and grass is coming up thick and green everywhere on the lawn. Mom and I trimmed back the rose bushes yesterday, in the sun. There was only the sound of the scissors and the warbling of birds.

The rose bush looks neat and tidy now, ready to sprout into a whole new summer's worth of roses. A little spray of green leaves has already shown itself at one juncture, like the trill of a bird. Those particular roses will be in bloom when Keith comes home.

Afterward

2009-04-25T13:50:00.000-07:00

The inside of my mouth carries the taste of old blood all day long and it hurts to swallow. I sleep a lot. As I was in the office, breathing in the laughing gas and feeling my body take on more and more weight, I remember seeing the dark glass of the window streaked with rain and beyond, the charcoal gray sky and dark woods wavering and somber.

"How are you feeling?" asked the oral surgeon, as he injected into the I.V the medicine that would put me to sleep.

"Sluggish," I said and my voice was thick, hazy at the edges. "Delightfully sluggish."

"Delightfully, huh?" he remarked with gentle humor and I remembered nothing else.

When I woke, the oral surgeon and his assistant were standing about the chair, with the air of those who have fought a great battle and come through triumphant.

"You have some strong teeth," he said, his arms crossed, leaning against the window.

"Have you ever broken a bone?" asked the assistant, leaning over my face.

"Um...." It was still hard to think clearly. "No, I haven't."

"I don't think you ever will," she said.

"Well," I said, concentrating hard on stringing together the joke and trying to grin around the bruised muscles, "at least I know there's something that makes me special."

"I don't think that's the only thing that makes you special," said the oral surgeon as he walked by me; he placed his large hand affectionately on my head for a moment as he went by.

I waited in the sunny car at Walgreen's while my mother picked up the prescriptions. My dreams were hazy, I floated in and out of consciousness. My dreams were full of a bright yellow color and the heat of the sun.

That afternoon as I lay dozing upstairs I heard the doorbell ring. My mom went hurriedly down the stairs and I heard her exclaim. I was hoping; but Keith had told me he couldn't find a way to order me any.

Regardless, a few moments later a large, gorgeous arrangement of yellow roses entered the room, followed by my mother with a shining face.

"Look what came!" she said, and brought them over to me, so I could stroke the soft, silky petals.

"I wish I could have been there," read the note. "I hope you're doing well. I love you! Keith."

"I found a way," he told me proudly, later on when he called. It's part of our inner knowledge of one another now, the tradition of Keith always being able to find a way.

As I drove to the airport to pick my mom up, I noted with interest the disparity between the rational mind and the insistence of the body. My mind assured me that it didn't matter a whit that the last time I had been there had been to drop off Keith; that had been a long time ago, in the dark of winter.

It was now a bright and sunny mid morning in spring, the air was washed with silvery light from the clouds and the delicate green of the open fields shimmered from it. It was a completely different day and could not touch me.

All the while the agony that my mind ignored had settled into my belly, already inflamed by coffee. I thought I could not bear it if I saw a soldier; I was tense with the pain I anticipated.

At arrivals, I knew immediately that there was a flight arriving soon that would be bringing soldiers home to their families. The fear fell off me; I sat quietly and waited. I understood that I was about to witness something that very few people could truly appreciate. I knew the agony those women had been through; I knew the long moments, the endless procession of days, the weeks and the months that preceded this one moment.

The women who were waiting for their men stood out in the crowd, they were glossed over with some inner light that was unmistakable. There were perhaps six or seven of them in the crowd, the rest were just a group of people waiting on an airplane.

The wives were in all different sizes and shapes, but they all had clearly carefully chosen their outfits, everything was accessorized, in place and lit up with a trembling expectation. Some had children, two little tow headed boys ran quickly around the lobby until their mother lost her patience and put one on a seat.

"Daddy will be here in one minute," she said in subdued tones.

"One minute!" breathed the little boy. "One minute. One minute," he kept counting under his breath, hoping, I knew without having to ask, that at the end of each utterance his daddy would appear.

Then they did begin to appear and pulled their women out of the crowd toward them as though they had thrown out lines and each couple came together with a silent thunderclap of emotion, the emotion went ringing out in sonic bursts onto the crowd; we felt the aftermath like rain.

The women went to their men dancing on tiptoe or surging forward, straight legged, already choking up in tears. They would embrace and then wander off in a daze to the side, where they would gather their things, tears tracing down their face; the men with shaking hands and careful movements, the adrenaline still rushing through them.

The waiting mother quickly shrugged off her jacket and stood in a brown, eyelet sun dress and in that moment I loved her dearly and knew her as my own sister. She wished her man to see her in everything she had chosen for him, the glossy, just washed hair, the platform, woven sandals, the tanned limbs. The fact that it was chilly and the practical necessity for a jacket fell by the way side.

There were only two wives waiting by the time Daddy appeared and he gathered his whole family in his arms and his face shown with a disbelieving, pure light. He sat down while his wife, tearful and trying to brush the tears away, began packing up the bags.

The soldier suddenly bent forward and swept one little boy up into his arms; held him lightly a long moment and then stood and pulled his wife into his arms again as though he were starving, and then bent and picked up a bag.

One wife was left. She stood bereft in the diminished crowd, all of us with the shining faces of the blessed. Her long legs were tanned and set off by a jean miniskirt, she was bangled and bejeweled, her face fresh and made up. She called a friend.

"The last time I spoke to him he was getting on the plane, right that minute!" she exclaimed, her voice breaking. "I'm freaking out! Where is he?" She turned in little half circles, her long hair swinging and suddenly her whole body jerked up, her feet went dancing forward and suddenly she was swept up in the arms of her staff sergeant, a tall and burly man with a quiet face; she stood up on tip toe in her white flip flops to kiss him again and again.

Soon after my mother appeared and I embraced her with all the love and tenderness the recent scenes had engendered in me. It was good, deeply good to see my mother and I loved her.

"There were like, six or seven soldiers that came home to their families while I was waiting for you," I admitted, as we walked away.

"Oh my dear," cried my mother, understanding at once, her sympathy quick and genuine. "Was it very hard? Anyway, your Keith will be home soon..."

"But it wasn't hard," I said, wondering at myself, and trying to find a way to express it. "It was...rich. It was like eating chocolate and truffles."

A Bad Day

2009-04-24T16:11:00.000-07:00

A strange thing happened last night which I think must be what accounts for my having had a very bad day today. There is no other reason that I can think of, except that I broke two of my newly purchased terracotta pots when I stopped at a red light.

That did make me furious, I must admit, really ridiculously furious considering that it was entirely my own fault. The pots only cost a dollar something each and were quickly replaced when I went back out for tomatoes and lettuce. It could not have been the pots.

And it couldn't have been the fact that instead of going on post to do my grocery shopping like I had been steeling myself to do now for weeks, I went to Walmart as usual. I just couldn't. I just simply couldn't drive up to the gate and present my I.D. and drive, stressed out and anxious, to the commissary.

And I couldn't see myself pushing the cart up and down the isles muttering under my breath, "Cash back, cash back; you must get cash back to tip the bagger." And trying to avoid looking at soldiers because it makes me heart sick for my own while my shoulders are up around my ears from the stress of it all.

And then waiting in line for the number to light up and then fumbling around for my I.D. again and then forgetting, of course, to ask for cash back and then not being able to tip the bagger and the weirdness of walking to my car while being followed by said bagger and groceries.

It couldn't have been avoiding all that which made the day so bad; after all, I'm sure I didn't spend that much more at Walmart than I would have at the commissary. And at Walmart I bought a Big Boy tomato plant and Sweet Basil and Cilantro and Lemon Thyme and the aforementioned terracotta pots.

I did very well with my shopping too; all my purchases trundling sedately down the belt to the cash register declared me to be an Informed Consumer. Generic spring scented detergent and fabric softer, fat free yogurt and all kinds of fruit and milk and orange juice and twelve grain bread.

The addition of Diet Coke (in preparation for my mother coming) pleasureably brought to mind cold glasses full to the brim with tinkling ice and fizzing gently away, desultory conversation, a good book, the smell of dinner cooking.

No, it couldn't have been the shopping, or the deprivation of caffeine until twelve o'clock. I had left the house in a hurry, as though by forcing the point I might actually turn left at the end of our street, and thus to the commissary and not right, toward cowardice and Big Boy tomatoes.

The lack of coffee can account for the missing tomatoes and lettuce that I only remembered when I got home, and a dull headache. But not a terrible day, because by twelve fifteen I had a hot cup of freshly ground and very strong coffee on the picnic table outside, while I potted up my plants; I drank the coffee with hands smudged by good, organic soil.

I had a lunch of BLT with maple bacon, which I ate in the bedroom while I finished reading "The Pilgrim's Inn" by Elizabeth Goudge, a book so good that the reading of it yesterday had caused the entire day to be good and was so much company that I never turned on the TV at all, but had a dinner of toast with honey and tea, curled up in the corner of the couch, in an amber pool of lamp light, while the fresh winds outside blew cool and damp through the house.

It was the book itself that had triggered the strange occurrence. I had been upstairs, propped up on pillows and accompanied by loving dogs and reading and loving such sentences as "Struggle is divine in itself, but to ask to see it crowned with success is to ask for that sign which is forbidden to those who must travel by faith alone...Good Lord, how tedious I am! That's the sermon I preached last Sunday. They all had a good sleep and I thanked God that I'd been able to rest them so nicely."

As I was reading I felt suddenly and very simply an outpouring of God's love on me, as though He had opened a door into an inner room that belongs to me. Usually I keep the door shut; sometimes He delights to surprise me by swinging it wide.

"Yes, Dear," I said. "And I love You too." And then my love for God, which is old and true and self defining, rolled over like a wave and got all tangled up with my love for my husband. And I saw him suddenly, clearly.

It was so clear that I could see how the sweat had made the close shaved hair at his temples darker, clump together into little darts and the sweat glistened amid the stubble on his cheeks. His heavy, round shoulders were slumped inward, whether from concentration or weariness I could not tell. He was not looking at me.

I put my hand on his head and prayed without words. It was a glad prayer, an up swelling of love and delight. I didn't feel any fear at the time, or strangeness. The moment passed and I closed the door, gently, and went back to my book. I felt full of peace and good company.

But as soon as I turned out the light I felt a shiver of unease. Why had that moment occurred? And it was worse because it has been a few days now since I have heard from Keith and the normal and reassuring sound of his voice usually keeps at bay the worst of those thoughts.

Without him the other voices get louder, were very loud by the time I woke up and realized he hadn't called that night. I am sure that the effort at keeping those voices at bay have been the root cause of all my restless misery today. He'll call, either tonight or tomorrow and I'll feel rather foolish and ridiculously light headed with relief. And he will have no idea.

In the meantime, I guess I'll drink my tea and sit on the deck and read.

Coming Full Circle

2009-04-23T10:34:00.000-07:00

Last night I heard someone playing "Taps" outside my open window. It was late in the evening; I was caught up in reading. The classical country CD had run its course and for a long time as I was reading all I heard was the continual faint sound of traffic, the rustle of paper as I turned a page, and the soft tapping of the wooden blinds.

The evenings last forever lately. The sun doesn't set until a quarter to eight and it takes hours for all the light to leave the sky. I had left the blinds open so I could see the twilight deepen outside and by the time I heard the notes it was cobalt blue out there.

At first I thought it was a recording, but it was too smooth and clear a sound; someone must have been standing outside, practising. It was haunting to hear that unmistakable sound come floating lightly over the dark air; I put the book down and, amazed, listened until they finished.

Mornings are the best time; the sunlight is white and refreshing. I go around opening all the windows and then fill the tin watering can. In bare feet with the can dripping, I make my rounds from planter to planter, leaving a trail of dark water blotches on the deck boards.

Yesterday I did all the laundry, stripped the bed and sorted the piles downstairs. By the end of the day I had my dry clean only hanging from the shower curtain rail and the ironing board up and in place. I felt as though I had gone back in time several decades; I felt like I should be wearing a frilly apron.

As summer draws closer, I feel the presence of my husband infusing the house after months and months of absence. It feels as if I might turn a corner and find him there. In the night, I reach my arm out across the bed, as though to check for sure. The damp, clean smell of wet earth from the sprinkler brings him back, and the sight of the leaves stretching wider and wider to catch all the sun they can.

The seasons have come around full circle; around this time last year we first met. I feel as if I have begun to complete a wide, lonely orbit that took me out into the dark edges of isolation at its farthest point from here. Now I feel the pull of summer and my husband stronger and irresistible; I seem to be picking up speed as the curve becomes sharper and I can feel the heat of the sun growing stronger.

I don't think I've ever lived so deeply as I have this past year and I worry that when Keith returns I will begin to take things for granted. Distance has this ability to sift what is true into layers; to cause what is unimportant to fall away and for what is best to rise to the surface.

Before Keith comes home, I'm going to make a list of all the qualities of Keith that distance tempered into steel, before the rush of day to day living muddies everything up. It will be purely a delight to be irritated by him, to wish him to go away; even if it is just to the garage and leave me be for a time. I'm looking forward to that kind of luxury; but I don't want to loose the clarity this year has won me; I paid too much for it.

Late Afternoon

2009-04-21T15:33:00.000-07:00

It has been a long, hot and lazy day and is shaping up to be a warm and quiet evening. It's that time of day right now when everything becomes still; the day teeters for a lengthening, breathless time between morning and evening.

I sat outside on the deck for a while and read. I had dragged the chair out into the hot sunshine and read with my sunglasses on. I could hear a dog bark a few yards down, but only once and half heartedly. I heard the faint tinkling of the ice cream truck from several streets away.

Earlier I had made a visit to the library armed with every one's suggestions, but not a single author was available. Not even Margaret Atwood. What god forsaken library doesn't carry a single one of Margaret Atwood's books? One located in a strip mall, that's what.

Weeks ago I got tired of wearing the same old heavy clothes I'd been wearing all winter. Today I wore a black jersey dress that dips low enough in front to reveal completely Keith's dog tag; normally it stays hidden under at least a few layers. I probably won't do this again; the combination of cleavage and silver icon was, I think, too much of something altogether.

He called this morning, out of the blue. The call showed "Unknown caller," which sometimes indicates credit card companies. Sundry and unsuspecting credit card representatives have been greeted by me in tones of joyous excitement. I'm sure it came as a refreshing break from the usual for them.

The left side of my jaw has been throbbing with a slowly increasing pain that I finally decided I could ignore no longer. The oral surgeon who had seen me months ago warned me that it must come out and was only a matter of time before it got completely infected.

If I can stand it another two weeks, my mother can fly out to be with me while I have the surgery. This time I'll be put completely under, IV drip and all. If it gets really bad sooner, my mom will fly out regardless. I day dream about taking a scalpel to the tooth, prying it out.

I'd written Keith to say I was holding back a certain portion of his salary to pay for my mother's ticket and what the insurance wouldn't cover, if that was alright with him. He called before heading out just to tell me in no uncertain terms that of course it was ok and he'd wanted me to get it taken care of a long time ago and it would be good for me to see my mother.

"If you want to, and I'm not sayin' you haf' to, but if you want to," began Keith in a voice that was inviting and suspiciously innocent, "...you could take the sheets off the HD and the fourwheeler and take some pictures. But only if you wanted to."

It turns out that I did want to, very much and have sent off several pictures to him, a few of me sitting on the seat of the four wheeler. I had forgotten how far off the ground that seat is. I remembered the sun lacing the path with shadows and the hot wind against my face and the sound of the motor filling my head.

Mostly I remember the sensation of yielding completely, having no control over the machine and simply floating over and around all the obstacles in our way. I won't uncover the machines again; it was simply too strange to do so and not have him there, planted firmly to the earth by his steel toed boots, turning his head to spit and wiping his hands on a rag.

He has been dreaming of me, good dreams. He often does and I'm jealous. My dreams are no where near as clear and real as his. What dream self of mine goes out to meet him without me?

"I am mission oriented now," he wrote me. For the first time in the entire deployment he feels like he is doing what he is suppose to be doing; living in tents and going on missions and not doing his laundry. The location makes me uneasy, but mostly I just don't think about it.

He's heard a rumor of coming home a month earlier; mostly he doesn't tell me these things so the fact that he did stands out to me; maybe he really will. I try not to think about that too much either.

I have by now entirely convinced myself of the existence of two completely different Iraqs. This happened very soon after he left; like double images that come from crossing one's eyes.

Therefore, everything bad that I hear about is happening in the other Iraq. It is not happening where Keith is now. I have no idea what I will do when he is deployed to the other country. I think there would be no form of self deception strong enough to ward off that reality; I will have to reach for something stronger.

I suspect that when I have him home again the two countries will collide into one with such force that I will be struck trembling and dumb with the accumulated terror. I don't think about that too much either, or the illusion will disappear. With all the things I'm busy not thinking about it's a wonder I have space in my head for anything else. That must be why I read so much.

Pop Culture

2009-04-19T19:26:00.000-07:00

Well, I had what one might describe as an all American evening. I ate a cheeseburger and watched Miss America. And winced and winced and winced and played sudoku because by the end I could hardly stand to watch. The host and hostess were the most crass, unpolished and awkward I have ever had the misfortune of watching.

Frankly, I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I did watch. But there it is. Some of the girls I thought were sweet and some of the dresses I thought were divine and mostly I thought thank the good lord I don't have that sort of drive. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

I borrowed a mostly unfortunate set of books from the library lately. There is no science to what I choose; I am a firm believer in picking a book based on its cover. If it's not an author I know and the cover is suitably attractive for me to grab it, I will then read a few lines and decide.

This time around I got "Snow Island" by Katherine Towler. This was a no brainer for me; it's set on a rocky island off the coast off Maine during the beginning of WWII. The writing is beautiful, spare and intelligent. She captures so perfectly not only life as it was then, but the harshness and the grace of human nature, especially coming of age.

However it was highly depressing, as it lacked a happy ending. After I realized this (yes, I read the end of books before I've finished.) I put this book aside and moved on to...

"The House of Mirth," by Edith Wharton. Ha. And again, I say Ha. The title misleads; the description on the back misleads; this book is not mirthful. Though it does capture in fascinating and clear and merciless detail what it was like to be in high society New York City in the early 1900s.

It is a classic, I sometimes read these just to see what all the fuss is about. However, I doubt that I will be finishing this book. It was clear from the second page that the author had trapped her character in a box that will grow ever smaller and smaller, in order to illustrate a certain reality. I appreciate the skill required to do this, but I can't stand to watch. So I put it down and read...

"A Thousand Voices" by Lisa Wingate. This was the one light and easy going book I managed to borrow. It's charming, well constructed and illustrates what it means to belong. I finished it in about five hours straight.

Desperate, I then considered my narrowing choices and decided to return to "Snow Island." It was worth reading through to the end, though it was even more depressing than I had at first anticipated. Despite this, I still would read it again and possibly again, I think because it speaks so true.

The next night, I glumly reviewed my choices: "Mrs. Dalloway" or the book that the librarian had foisted on me when I asked her if she had any recommendations for a novel or an author that captured the spirit of the 1940s, as John Steinbeck had done for the 30s.

I didn't want her to feel bad, so I took it and thanked her and made a private note do my own research at home. The book was "Yellow Star" by Jennifer Roy. It is the true story of a young girl and her family, Polish Jews caught up in the Holocaust and how they survived six years in a ghetto in Lodz.

This book was unexpectedly beautiful, due not only to the emerging strength, will to live and good humor of her family, herself and her father in particular, but also because it's written in a simple prose. This had the amazing effect of actually capturing a child's voice and perspective. I was immediately swept up by the story and finished it in one sitting.

Though "Yellow Star" was ultimately a story of the triumph of human spirit over adversity, it was by far not an easy book to read. The next night, I looked with hope to my last selection, the one I had made completely on a whim; "Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf.

From the moment I began reading I was caught up in a glittering tide of life. It was a joy to read. Her voice is powerful, beguiling and poetic. And the passages! This in particular:

"It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially since her illness, had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in her spine..."

How did she know to capture it like that? I could go on all night coping pieces of it down but I won't. And she succeeds, Virginia Woolf does, she succeeds in actually capturing a woman's whole life in one day and the beauty of the bells ringing through the novel and changing quality of the sunlight and all the voices of the characters blending together and calling out. I will eventually own my own copy of this book.

I also finished, for the...oh lord...I have no idea. More than six times, I have read my battered, paperback copy of "Mrs. Mike" that still smells faintly musty. I do dearly love that simple story though, of the sixteen year old Irish red head that fell in love with a Monty and followed him into the Canadian wilderness. The book used to belong to my mother; she graciously let me take it with me when I left home.

I've also been watching documentaries lately (mostly because I ran out of the ninety nine cent rentals at the local Block Buster) and now wonder why we bother to make stuff up when real life is so much more interesting. I watched "Harlan Country, USA," about a coal miner's strike in Kentucky. I pretty much cried my entire way through it. I also watched "Gunner Palace" and "God's Country." Both are very good.

I spent three or four days straight watching the documentary "The War." This is a seven episode, six disc documentary on WWII. I spent those three or four days with tears streaming down my face.

I cried because I was proud to be an American, I cried because her Staff Sergeant would never come home, I cried because the German boy with his brains in the snow looked like my brother and couldn't be more than thirteen, I cried because in the North African front, in the first real battle the Americans got into, scores of men died because they hadn't learned to dig deep enough and the German tanks would roll over them and crush them to death.

I would get up from the couch in the dim twilight and wander around my own house, dazed. I would turn the TV on as a form of self defense. I will never think of that war in the same way again.

I have yet to finish "Mrs. Dalloway," mostly because I tried to pace myself and because after I'm finished, I will have no more books and will have to make another trek to the library.

Is anyone reading anything particularly good that they can recommend?

This Week's Blog Farts

2009-04-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if it's possible to have blog farts when one hasn't blogged all week, but these are half developed ideas that could have made their own blog if I'd had the energy to do so. I guess that qualifies them.

1. It is snowing outside, a wet thin snow that isn't sticking to the pavement but that is bending the faces of the pansies toward the ground and highlighting roofs.

When I complained about the snow to my good neighbor Larry he replied that we needed the moisture and he wished it would snow day and night. I wanted to reply crisply was he aware that there were other forms of precipitation than snow and far more appropriate to the season?

I did not. It is a native's form of pride out here to gloat in spring snow. The natives here have been so buried under an avalanche of new comers that I cannot begrudge them their cherished distinctions.

Not that it doesn't snow some in April back in Yank town, my native habitat. It does and it will. But everyone is properly horrified because lord knows, we've gotten more than enough moisture in its various and proper forms, such as rain, hail, ice storms and nor'easters.

2. I was driving to work yesterday when the song "Smooth" came on, by Santana and Rob Thomas. It was released back in the summer of 1999; I was twenty one years old. Listening to the song, I remembered the kind of animal like satisfaction that is intrinsic to youth itself, that has no other justification.

It makes me think of a young lion stretching lazily in the sun; it makes me think of my younger brother, his dirty blond hair curling into his eyes, lying with his legs stretched out on the carpet, smoking a cheap cigar and expounding lazily on the best way to survive a zombie attack.

3. I have lately come through rather embarrassing regression to an early deployment mindset. I have been beleaguered by loneliness, restlessness and a sharp, aching need for the physical presence of my husband much more acute than the usual, manageable dull throb.

He's gone somewhere else and as a result, I hear from him very rarely, either by phone or by Internet. All the strength I had ascribed to myself lay more accurately in the circumstances of communication that we had enjoyed ever since he returned from R&R, back in late December.

I have moped about the house, gone for long walks, devoured novels, watched documentaries; in short, done whatever I could to distract myself until I could adjust. I felt as though I were sinking deeper into the deployment; as though the deployment were some form of slow moving morass that was sucking me in further and further into the quiet.

I got so impatient with myself. Why couldn't I be grateful? If November-Me or Early-January-Me was here, I have a feeling I might be b-tch slapping myself. How dare I complain, when my husband's return is less than four months away? Less than four months!! Who cares what the circumstances are right now, all I have to do is endure and I'll have him beside me.

But it didn't matter how much I lectured myself, I was sunk and until I adjusted, I remained in that depressing place. Now I begin to get the hang of things again and to feel more stable and next week the temperature will reach the seventies, with sun falling down hot and strong on the sidewalks and in two weeks the leaves will begin to show themselves on the birch tree. Right now it's covered in tiny, silver mittens. I had no idea birch trees did that.

4. I have read the English novels that helped me through this stage at least two or three times, some of them five or six. It wasn't until this time around that I noticed no one ever goes to the bathroom.

I noticed this because the main characters are constantly drinking. Here's an average day in the life of an English novel heroine: she wakes and drinks coffee or tea. She either goes out visits or receives visitors and drinks either a second cup of coffee or tea. She has lunch with tea, or she has high tea with (obviously) tea.

Then she has pre dinner drinks, usually sherry. With dinner she will have wine. After dinner she will either have coffee or scotch with soda. (Any Americans present with have Scotch on the rocks; such is the distinction.) If she cannot sleep, she will get up and make herself-you guessed it-more tea or perhaps warm milk.

At no point in this day does she ever raise her hand, timidly or desperately, to declare that she simply must use the loo. On her walk into the village for some lamb or mackerel she does not feel the need to rush off into the hedgerows. On her ride through the countryside with her romantic interest, when they stop for high tea at a little tea house, she does not excuse herself to the power room.

I understand using the bathroom is not romantic and may ruin the mood set by the nodding daffodils, the Limoges china and the windy coast of Cornwall. I write myself, I know how this goes. But I couldn't help but feel so sorry for the poor heroine. Those are not just any drinks; those are the drinks that will send any hapless human ricocheting back and forth from the WC for several hours straight after partaking. I mean, tea! Alcohol and coffee! One after another after another.

I could only figure that the English must have, after generations upon generations of drinking in this way, have developed bladders the size of which no other race can compare to.

Falling in Love at Last

2009-04-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

I have discovered a new love. I've been courted and tempted by this love for a long, long time but always I resisted. I told myself that I wasn't good enough, that I didn't have enough time or space or that it was a waste of my resources. But this season I have succumbed and in a big way.

It all started with a vision of Keith returning to a house decked out in flowers, with a lawn as green and thick as frosting. It would be my gift to him and my way of proving that I was up to all the responsibility he was handing to me as he left.

All through the months of fall as I watched the grass die and wither away and all through the long winter months, I dreamed of spring. Of fertilizers and the sprinkler, of flowers hanging off of windowsills and sitting in pots on the front steps.

I waited through all the gloriously hot and sunny days of March, knowing that the weather was only an invitation to calamity for the hasty minded. It was too soon to plant seed. I started to water the lawn, long deep soaks with the broken sprinkler that I had to move from place to place every ten minutes or so.

In the first week of April I sprayed on Revive and the green grass became greener but bare patches remained. I lugged away the heavy squares of dead sod from last summer, revealing packed soil beneath and raked up armfuls of debris. I bought Scott's Patch Repair and used Keith's hoe to break up the ground in the dead spots before applying the seed.

Yesterday, though, I knew it was time to really embark. I had paid all my bills, I had disposable income and a sunny day and it was mid April. It was time. Off I trundled to Walmart, suddenly filled with elation and talking first to my mom and then my dad about the best way to create pot gardens, which flowers were best for the sunny back deck and which for the shady front steps.

All the names were like prose; pansies, petunias and inpatients. Primrose, asters, and lobelia. At the store, I bought two sixteen inch pots, four hanging planters, two watering cans, two bags of potting soil, deep shade grass seed and finally, a new sprinkler.

I didn't like the selection of flowers there, so I went to Home Depot; the first time I'd been there without Keith. I hate going anywhere like that, I feel the pain of his absence sharply all over again before it dulls away into the usual quiet ache.

The flowers at Home Depot had spilled out of the Nursery and onto the pavement and I was drawn there, helpless to resist. I wandered around, stunned by all I saw. Eventually I bought three flats of pansies, blue and white.

At home I was too eager to stop for lunch, I grabbed an apple to crunch on for a snack and began potting. I loved the feel of the plants as they slid loose from the container, the roots perfectly compacted and damp, tender feeling to the finger tips. I arranged three hanging planters with pansies and hung them all along the roof of the deck.

Immediately the back deck seemed like a brand new place. I rearranged the furniture and planned in my mind where I would put the potted tomato plant and herb garden; along the sunny fence in the sun drenched corner, and placed the large pot that will contain my geranium next to the garage side door. I will put a window box to hang off the bit of deck railing that is there, and plants will trail down from it and it will be a glorious little corner.

How I love that geranium. Previously, everything I cared for, aloe vera, cacti and roses, all had slowly but surely sunk under my misguided care. But the geranium was the plant that actually proved to me I could keep things alive.

Keith bought it for me at the PX when we had gone there to buy a gift for his friend's little girl, who was turning three. Keith was on the lookout for a tiller and we wandered into the little garden area in the back.

He didn't see any tillers he liked, but I spotted the large, exuberant plant on display and coveted it. In the impulsive shopping way that he has, he swept it up among the other purchases. At the register, it rang up over twenty dollars and we looked at each other in dismay. But home it came.

It almost died when we were in Indiana and the neighbor didn't water it. It came back from the brink though, and in the late fall I brought it in doors, where it has since been languishing, first on one of Keith's speakers by the front window, until he noticed this in one of the pictures and put an end to that.

And then upstairs at the foot of the bed, where dead leaves fluttered down silently unto the carpet. When the days began to get sunny, I brought it into the kitchen and put it by the sliding glass doors, gave it plant food and lots of water and it sprung into life, putting out long, leggy shoots that reach out for the sunlight. It's been day tripping to the back deck the last few weeks, but I haven't let it spend the nights there, it's too cold yet.

The front yard now looks a sight, there are irregularly shaped blue patches were I put down the Scott's patch repair; the mulch it comes with is blue tinted recycled newspaper bits. And the entire half of one side of the lawn is bare and brown. That half is shaded by the towering pine trees and I sowed the grass seed there by hand, defying the instructions that told me I should use one of those spreader machines.

I soaked it all deeply last night and got up this morning to do the same when I saw to my horror that it was snowing. But the pansies are still bright and fresh and potting soil is spread about on the deck floor and the blue pot is out on the front steps, awaiting fillers. I want something that spills like froth over the sides and something tall and angular in the back and then something thick, with glossy leaves and white blossoms to bulk it out.

I'm going to plant yellow roses along the chain link fence that divides our yard from the good neighbor Larry and plant some glossy and verdant ground cover under the pine tree at the front corner. And this fall, I will plant bulbs all around the stones and the pathway to the front door. That way, next spring I'll be walking along side daffodils when I go to get the mail.

But mostly I dream of Keith coming home and the lawn grown out of the awkward adolesent stage it's in now and flowers everywhere, all the rock beds clean and white, pots spilling down the front stairs and an American flag in the now empty holder on the side of the house. The fact that I can begin to work on this, after almost a year's worth of dreaming is a delight undimmed by the snowfall.

Blog Fart Fridays

2009-04-10T08:44:00.000-07:00

Jaci over at Ravings of a Mad Housewife, a great writer with a razor sharp sense of humor, has come up with this entertaining idea; that on Fridays whoever wishes to join can patch together all the left over scrap that didn't make it into a "real" blog during the week and post it as "Blog Farts."

1. I have finally found the perfect location for the litter box. Previously, it was in what I like to call the Den and what my husband persists in calling the "I-Love-Me-Room."

The problem with having the litter box down here is that the cat, after doing his business, then promptly carried bits and pieces of soiled litter and deposited it on every surface. Not only that, but the dogs discovered the fascinating depths of the covered box and decided then and there that it was their own personal snack bar. And stuff was always being made fresh!

So I ended up feeling as though I were typing in the midst of unthinkable filth, not conducive to great writing (Yeah! That's why I'm procrastinating on my writing! It's the environment!) I tried backing the entrance of the litter box to the wall leaving just a gap for him to climb in, but that just discouraged the cat from using it and me from cleaning it and let's just say that a bad, bad thing.

So now the litter box is in the bathtub. It's perfect. The dogs can't get to it, the cat can and I can clean it easily. When the cat tracks litter, I can just wash it down with the spray head. I'm not quite sure what we'll do when we actually need the second bathroom, but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

2. I know I've talked about country music before, but I do listen to it on an almost constant basis now and it occurred to me that it's the only song genre that feels the need to constantly justify and celebrate its own existence.

For the sake of illustration, let's pretend there is a genre of song called "Suburban." Suburban song artists make up songs like "Two Grocery Chains within One Half Mile" and "Me and My Minivan." Also, "Sometimes I Don't Know Which Home is Mine" and "I Really Do Need This SUV" are classics.

In fact, let's all sing along with the chorus right now: "Ohhh oh oh, I drive the mountain ranges, I fly fish in Brazil, I'm employed by National Geographic part time on Sundays... and I get fifteen MPG on the freeway, I really do need this SUV."

Country song artists write songs about themselves talking on planes to random strangers about why they write Country songs. Because the world must know. And they do so because they are songs about their life. Good music alone is not enough, it must constantly illustrate for them who they are and why they live that way.

I suspect because not very many people actually do live that way. Raise your hand if you live in a town where the town clock has been stuck at two since you were a child? Who knows of a marriage between the quarter back and the home coming queen that survived the first three years?

I love Country songs, I really do. I just wish they wouldn't feel the need to sing about themselves quite so much. I get it; it's Country; they had me at the twang.

-By this Point-

2009-04-08T18:46:00.000-07:00

By this point I have slept beside your
empty side of the bed so long
I have achieved my own incline.

Our memories have by overuse all been
polished into set pieces of a play given
nightly to a rapt and ardent audience
of one.

By this point my torid liaison with the cell phone
has reached a codependance unmatched by
any paltry human affair.

I have by necessity replaced your face
with pictures
and transformed all your quirks into heroics.

Even our arguments by now glimmer rosily
in the reflected light of romance; how gracefully
I now recall the dog dish, unexpected guests,
boiled eggs.

By this point I have been so long in open water
I no longer even consider what it is to walk and
all my tricks, blurred vision and horrid pep talks
have all turned stale-I want what is real.

Your arrival lingers so near that everything else,
by this point, has become insufferable.

Postal Tips

2009-04-08T15:02:00.000-07:00

So I have some advice about meeting men. Go the post office, act like you have no idea what you are doing, hold up the line and someone will hit on you. I don't know if having one's hair up in a twist with bobby pins helped or not, but it might have. Couldn't hurt to try.

On Tuesday I forced myself up and out the door, on the distasteful mission of returning some packages, two very large and heavy ones at that. I had been putting it off forever, mostly because as soon as I enter the post office doors, I cease to think clearly. I did not have to pretend to not know what I was doing, that came naturally.

In fact, I simply pushed one heavy package up to the postal worker and cheerfully announced that post offices cause me to feel inescapably stupid and I had packages to ship and here was the address, and could they tell me what I needed to do next?

Thus began a nearly hour long visit as I got first the wrong label and then the wrong customs form, and then the right label and then the correct customs form. I heaved the package onto the counter, where it towered over the poor postal agent as he tried to weigh it.

All this time there was a long, slowly moving line behind me. In between corrections, my postal worker took other customers while I retreated to a quiet corner to write for the zillionth time my address, etc. I decided not to waste time being self conscious and simply be good natured about the fact that my idiocy had a large audience whose boredom only increased the interest value of my plight.

It cost and arm and a leg, but I choose to send it anyway, since I just couldn't bear the thought of pushing and lugging the damn things out the exit door under the gaze of so many interested parties.

I was finishing up the correct customs form where I felt the presence of someone come up right behind me and say, into my ear, "Excuse me."

I was not alarmed. I thought surely anyone entering my personal space like that must be someone I knew, so I turned with a pleasantly expectant look on my face that faded away into puzzlement. A complete stranger stood there, respectable in grey suit and glasses.

"I see you're having quite some trouble with those packages," he said conversationally.

I pegged him as someone making conversation while waiting their turn. "Yes, rather," I said with a grin. (I've been reading a great deal of English novels lately.)

He opened his mouth to say something else; I vaguely expected offers of package help, perhaps he had a shipping tip to share or something along those lines. Instead, his gaze dropped to my hand resting on the counter top.

"You're married," he said flatly, without, apparently, stopping to think.

"Yes," I replied, amazed and amused. He was not yet put off. He leaned forward slightly.

"Happily married?" he inquired, his eyes bright behind his glasses.

My mouth dropped open. "Yes!" I repeated, my amazement now impossible to hide. And even though Keith is in Iraq, I half expected to hear his voice come thundering down like the voice of a wrathful god. "And you have no idea who I'm married to," I thought to myself with a grin. "Cause if he was here, you'd be missing half your teeth.

Upon learning that I was happily married and seeing the deepening amusement on my face, he then had the decency to look hangdog and scuttled off. I could hardly contain my wonder that the bizarre exchange and almost turned to the line to ask, "Did you all see that? Did you just see that?"

I didn't though. In between spats of irrepressible giggles, I finished up my business and escaped, so flustered I forgot to pick up the package that my husband had shipped to me, full of gear he doesn't need any more. The husband to whom I am indeed happily married.

I immediately shared this story with him, in the hopes that he would no longer send me off on errands to the post office. My ploy has worked; I am banned from conducting any further business there. However, it might be the place to go if one is actually in the market for a man.

April Begins

2009-03-29T21:11:00.000-07:00

As I was leaving work last week, I saw a flurry of movement out of the corner of my eye. It was a still, quiet evening around seven. There was a chill in the air left from the snow melting and the sky was a pewter blue.

I lifted my head in time to see a fox leaping, his motion fluid and feral, silent. Following on his heels was a grey creature that was either a fox or a coyote. Both were focused, seamless in their motion; they leaped up over the curb and into the tangle of bushes beyond and completely disappeared without a sound.

Close above them I could see the black flurry of a crow's wings, his harsh cries loud in the still air. The crow rose up into the trees, leaving only echoes of his voice. I was left wondering if I'd imagined it. My mouth had literally dropped open; I had to remind myself to close it.

The experience was full of some kind of wild magic and it came over me all at once- no wonder our ancestors worshiped animals, no wonder they thought the animals portents and spirits.

Soon Keith will be unable to reach me by phone or have access to the Internet. He will be in this place until the end of deployment. Eventually phone lines will be run out, I don't know how long it takes for them to set it up.

But every time he calls now it feels twice as urgent to get through, to hear his voice but the connection has gotten steadily worse. Today was a constant stream of interrupted calls as he tried again and again to get through and couldn't hear me.

It is so heartbreaking every time I hear his voice start out so hopeful and then trail off into resignation as he realizes he can't hear me. Especially as the day went on and his voice got more and more tired. It is so frustrating to hear him speak with such exhaustion and to not be able to reply. I think he ended up getting about two hours sleep.

The missing him is getting worse and time is not going by quickly enough to keep pace with the growing intensity of the feeling. Sometimes I feel as if I am a small child, having a temper tantrum, kicking my heels against time. The last three days of March crawled by so slowly I thought I would scream.

Now that's April, I feel better. April is the gateway to summer. The best thing about April, in fact, is that May comes after it. Especially as more snow is predicted this weekend. I forgot that out here, the reckoning for all those sunny, mild days of winter is a cold and miserably snowy spring.

I had to move something into the garage today, which meant of course going into his closet (to get the key) and the inevitable shirt detour. All the scent is gone from the shirt he married me in; I kept it, and the white tee shirt he wore beneath it, in the back of the closet. I never washed it. But now all it smells like is the closet itself, faintly of linoleum and cotton.

(By the way, he has given me permission to buy him clothes. The poor man has no idea. I got all excited and asked him if he liked chinos. "I don't even know what that is," he protested gruffly. But it's too late for him! He gave permission!! He has no idea what his closet will look like by the time he comes back.)

Abby waited intent at the opening of the door into the garage. I looked down at her and tried to explain that he wasn't in there. She was having none of it. As far as she was concerned, her daddy had been locked up in the garage for time untold, in possession of both the basketball and the highball and now she was going in after him.

Her face when she stood in the darkened, empty space of the garage looking back at me was unmistakable; she was shocked and let down. The sadness in her eyes made me want to cry.

"I told you," I said. "I told you he wasn't here."

He refinanced the house. We will have it paid off in fifteen years and save a massive amount of money. The monthly payment is slightly higher than it was and I reminded him that he would have to be aware that we couldn't just go off and buy whatever we wanted now, no boats, no flat screen TVs, none of that stuff.

"Yes, Captain," he replied teasingly and then the call dropped.

"Honey," he added, when he got through again, "you know I'm always gonna take care of us."

"I know," I said, and suddenly I did know; the knowledge washed over me with a deeper reality than ever before. I felt the solidity of him, of our marriage, of our future. All the breath went out of my body in one long rush of relief, a breath so deep and long that I must have been holding it for the past ten years.

An Unusual Day

2009-03-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

My poor husband tried to call me this morning, but the phone lag was even greater than usual, sometimes as much as twenty seconds. This meant that he would say, "I love you" and I would say it back and in the meantime he would be saying, puzzled and a little lost, "Are you there, Sweetie? Can you hear me?" and by the time he heard me saying that I loved him, I was already saying, "I'm here! Can you hear me? I can hear you," and so on and so forth in this manner.

"I'm going to say I love you and then I'm going to say bye and then you'll say you love me and that way we'll both know when to hang up," he explained earnestly, soon after we'd given up having a decent conversation.

The phone connection is through his high speed Internet, so he gets it at a very cheap rate. Consequently, when he is off duty we are frequently on the phone. We are on the phone while he shaves and I can hear the hum of the electric razor. I can hear when he thumps around the room getting ready for the day, or when someone knocks on the door and he shouts out to them something in a voice completely different from the one he was just using with me.

The other day the connection failed entirely and he spent three hours bull headedly hunting the down the problem, starting with his own computer and then outside, along the lines of cables until he got it working again.

The snow is all melting away in a mad rush, sheets of water run rippling in wide, shallow rivers down the streets, that pool in large, uneasy basins of water at the corners, all heavy with slush.

A steady steam comes dripping over the edge of the deck roof and from the eaves of the garage. Steadily the snow retreats from the front lawn, revealing larger and larger patches of bedraggled grass, yellow brown mostly, with the green shoots standing tall and proud around the roots of the birch tree.

I have started writing my story, on the story itself. I started and failed many times to write a plot outline and though I have a rough idea in my head of the internal and external conflicts that will drive the story, I am not sure of their placement within the story and at some point I realized that I wouldn't know until I started writing the damn thing.

It is hard work and I find myself constantly distracted by small things, I sometimes can only write a single sentence and then must do something else. Despite that, it came immediately and gratifying alive the moment I began and the characters move and speak in the ways I thought that they might.

I can tell that this will not be a sophisticated or intellectual story; this story will be far more along the lines of a made for Hallmark movie and I have settled in myself that it will be so. I thought about making it dark, for a long while I could feel a heavy shadow of something evil lurking and I tossed out many different situations in which the darkness would play out, but I gave up. I don't want to write that kind of story.

It will be a romance, the characters will be human, it will be historical and it will end happily. Apparently, that is the kind of writer that I am; I will embrace the reality.

Also apparent is that it will take a long, long time to write. I won't be putting any piece of it on my blog either, mostly because if I put it under public eye, I would need to edit it and I'm already forcing myself not to do that as it is; I simply need to write the damn thing before I second guess my language, sentence structure, characterization, etc, etc.

I went out to start my car for work and I turned the key, the engine coughed, choked and growled away into silence. Horrified, I pretended that the following had not happened, and turned the key again and it simply ground away, with the battery light flickering.

How could this have happened? I asked myself, standing in the garage, bewildered and horrified. What would I do now? If a car does not start, how can one get it to the mechanics in order for them to fix it? Jumper cables lurked into my mind, but did not take firm hold just yet.

I called work instead and was put on hold while they tried to find someone to come pick me up. In the meantime, good neighbor Larry drove home and my next clear thought was to call him. He came over and the cables materialized.

But my car was in the garage, how was it to get out? By pushing it, it turned out. Larry attached the cables and let the car soak up some juice. When he started the car, it started slowly, as though hauling itself to its feet, pushing the gears to turn, until finally, painfully, it caught and started rumbling away again. I turned it off and then on again, everything seemed once again fine.

But I did not trust my car. The circle of trust had been broken and there was no getting it back again. As a sign of this, the cables were placed in my trunk, in case the car would not start after my shift at work.

It did, and I arrived home just fine, but my car has betrayed me. After years and years of smooth and faultless performance, it has let me down. I'll always have this little shiver of worry about whether or not it will strand me somewhere; the grocery store, a side street down town where I parked before meeting a friend for lunch, or at the dentist. I just never know. It's a scary world out there.

Winter Weather

2009-03-26T17:10:00.000-07:00

I have finished "The Great Santini" and am satisfied- at least as far as books are concerned.

As the two TV stations duelling for ultimate supremacy over this tiny little region have declared over and over again in the last twenty four hours, a winter storm is upon us. One station declared frequently that they have live Doppler radar, while the other declares that they knew this storm was coming on Sunday. The first returns with the emotional declaration that they are on my side. They both passionately swear by all the small gods of television to bring me news of impending weather catastrophe first.

In the meantime, I went out this morning, while there was still a part of the sky clear of the clouds. Coming home in the weak sunshine, I could see the sky to the North layered over and over again with blue bellied clouds, tumbling and rolling one over another, as high I could see.

A few hours after I got home, the sun was shut out for good and the snow came swirling in, at first gay and light, pirouetting across the window panes, distracting me from my book. Driven by gusts of winds, the snow quickly became businesslike and horizontal.

Meanwhile, the temperature has steady dropped. I brewed tea in the kitchen, darkened and dim in the blue light of the storm. Then I checked the heater and found that I had set the temperature at sixty degrees, back when Spring was not a figment of my imagination.

I set it to seventy degrees just now and I am beginning to feel my feet again. (Don't worry, Sweetie, I'll turn it back down again before I go to bed. And the car is in the garage.) Outside it is getting worse; the wind is howling, sculpting the snow into spare and beautiful shapes across the roof tops and at the bottoms of the windows. And it is cold, cold, cold out there.

Of Books, Spaghetti and Men

2009-03-25T13:27:00.000-07:00

...and not necessarily in that order.

Filled with an irrepressible longing, this morning I made my way to Barnes and Noble to purchase Pat Conroy's "The Great Santini." I read it years and years ago and lately simply needed to read it again.

So I have been upstairs on the bed reading my brand new copy for the past couple of hours. I had to put it down every couple of minutes, it felt like, as longing for Keith swept over me. I've learned it's better to respect such moments by acknowledging them and then moving on, than trying to resist.

It seems to me that over the past month, the tough rind that protected me through out much of the deployment has thinned down into mere skin; my own skin. I feel alive to each sensation of missing him and needing him.

When Keith is home, there is this feeling of living with an alien creature or a large, semi domesticated animal. I miss the thrill of that, the thrill of not knowing what he might do next, of knowing that he's not quite tame, but all mine.

He always moves with this air of bracing freedom and I must yield to it, because there's no way to resist it. He will do what he wishes and he will say exactly what he thinks and he won't sugar coat it, and so I find myself completely relaxed. Well, eventually I get there.

I learned this best when we were in Indiana and his female relatives looked at me like, "Aren't you going to say something, curb him?" And I knew then that I would have to release myself from his actions, let him go and be at peace with it.

Though I have tempered him, actually. Last night he was joking about getting a second wife, like some cultures allow and I told him not on his life, which made him made him laugh his delightful, deep and rumbling laughter.

"Never mind that," he said suddenly. "I couldn't take two of you; it'd be way too narrow."

"Whaddya mean by that?" I asked, suspicious. That did not sound like a compliment to me.

"Well, just one of you has got me on the straight and narrow," he confessed. "I don't even wanna think about what two of you would do."

"Humph," I replied. "On second thought, I could do with a second me, I could tell her, "You go; it's your turn to go talk him down." And then suddenly the deliciousness of that option hit me, and I laughed.

"Woman!" he protested, "That's not funny! You stop laughing! Woman...!"

I remember so clearly lying upstairs on the bed, waiting to see his truck come down the street and pull into the drive way, and wondering, almost nervous, what he would be bringing home from work with him. Would he be alive with frustration, or heavy with anger, or bright with satisfaction?

I would brace myself for the sweep of energy that he would bring in the front door with him, striding through the house in his boots, bellowing out for me, sorting through the mail, and rummaging around in the fridge. As soon as he was home my anxiety would dissipate and I found myself slipping effortlessly from one climate to another, no matter what his mood.

"You marry a man for life, but not for lunch," I remember reading in a novel and being struck by the statement, more because of its cleverness than because I had any idea of what she was talking about.

But now I think I do. I must have the house to myself for the long, quiet stretch of mid day, to prepare and renew. I feel the lack of it on weekends, when we've both been sharing the same space for two days straight. Because of this, Monday is a clear and cool relief and Monday afternoon, when he came home, a renewed felicity.

(Isn't that a pretty word, felicity? Why is it that some words become old fashioned, while others live on, bright like a penny? Why did felicity happen to fall by the wayside?)

Well, I must return to devouring my novel and missing Keith ferociously. (There are some strong appetites in this house at the moment; no wonder I made myself a huge, steaming pot of spaghetti! It doesn't quite compensate, obviously...sigh.)

A Night in the Life

2009-03-23T19:40:00.000-07:00

On Monday nights, the Activities Coordinator has scheduled Poetry Club. This is led by a dapper and gentle resident. He always is dressed to the nines and walks slowly about with the help of a cane. He served in WWII flying bombers over Germany and came home to spend a civilized and compassionate life that is illuminated by family, his thoughtful poetry and water color paintings.

Each Monday he appears at least a half an hour early, with a manila folder containing poems of his that he has selected for the evening, a book or two of other poets, often one of Frost, and a pad of paper.

On his way past my desk, he greets me courteously and then sits in the empty Bistro area, waiting, occasionally re-arranging his little pile of documents. In the evening, the lights are flat and glint from the darkened windows, the tables look bare and cold; it is silent and still.

Every Monday night, my heart contracts with anxiety for him. What if no one shows? What if he is crushed? I then rush around, pulling in hapless residents from where ever I can find them; the half asleep H- is gathered from the front room, I find E- reclining in her darkened bedroom. B- comes rolling ponderously down the hallway in his wheelchair, I find M- wandering about, her jacket over her arm, wanting to know what this evening's program will be.

And there we are, a group. H- nods off quietly to sleep, his hands folded in his lap, sometimes startled awake by the sound of my voice and a listening look comes over his face. E- sits composedly, listening with enjoyment. M- fidgets and would leave except she knows this wouldn't be polite and by then isn't sure what she is attending, is it a religious service?

I love to watch the look of delight that passes over our house poet's worn face as he hears me read his poems aloud; it's as though he remembers them all over again. He never fails to stop by my desk and thank me for reading them. I always tell him that it's my pleasure. And then we are safe; at least until next Monday night.

The weather has changed drastically. When I walked the house dog, fat pieces of damp snow were falling straight from the slate grey sky. In the river there were several ducks paddling against the current, the fading light turned the tumbling water green, purple and blue black.

Our house dog is named Junior, though by now he can be more accurately described as senior, rather fitting, considering his home. It is my responsibility to walk him. I get paid to walk a dog, albeit with the phone at my hip in case of incoming calls.

This old fellow often follows me around, though he gets winded and must flop down halfway along, tongue lolling. He sprawls out in the most shameless manner, flat on his back, his paws up in the air, or on his belly smack in front of the main doors, where startled guests must step gingerly over him.

Today, I sorted the mail. First I make three piles, one of deliverable mail (not all residents get their mail), non deliverable mail, and general company mail. I then sort the deliverable mail into order by the building's geography, so that mail for the room I go to first is on top of the pile.

I then go on my prescribed route. Tonight my route ended in the kitchen, where I went into the cooler after frozen cookie dough. As I did so, the dietary staff came in the main door just in time to hear the eerie whoosh of the cooler door closing behind me.

When they opened the cooler door, the door to the inner recesses of the deep freeze had already closed behind me. They saw nothing but shelves of fruit and vegetables, and retreated to the stove, to question what they had heard. When I came out, unaware, they saw the door open and had spun around, hearts pounding to see what was coming out, unbidden, from the frozen dark.

"Dude, you freaked us out!" said one, as I appeared, putting her hand to her chest.

After scaring the dietary team members out of their minds, I then went on to other jobs. I made cookies; that is, I placed the frozen dough on the cookie sheet and put it in the toaster oven for seventeen minutes. I then sorted general company mail, stamping invoices and statements with a satisfying thump.

Finally, I sort the undeliverable mail and am left at last with a pile of mail for residents so long gone that no one knows who they were or what address their billable party now resides at. This is a sad and lost little pile of mail and goes into the very bottom of the floral box with the flowing script that tells me, each time I close the lid, that "Anything is Possible!" I'm not so sure this is a good thing, to be honest.

I do all this in my pair of brown suede heels with scalloped trim and tiny, off set buckles across the toe. Some of the girls at work have commented on my shoes, always a good feeling. But I also remember the girl I was, not so long ago, who lived in Birkenstocks.

This began when I found a discarded pair at a church rummage sale. I wore those shoes until the cork wore completely through. I then carefully, with a deep seated thrill, ordered a pair specially from Europe, the exact kind I wanted, not available in the local shoe store.

I wore those every single day for years and years. In the winter time, I wore Birkenstocks with heavy, woolen stocks over woolen tights. It is possible in New England to find woolen tights in adult sizes. I had three pairs, in forest green, black and brown. They were ribbed and very scratchy. But as I always wore skirts, they were absolutely necessary.

I don't remember when the transition from Birkinstocks to heels came. Probably Japan. In Japan, for the first time I felt the sheer joy of shoes. They were arranged like candy on shelves, in beautiful colors and elegant lines, and seemingly so affordable, only eight hundred yen! Why that's not even real money, or so it felt like. It's so much easier to spend money not in dollars, I have found. It's harder to take it seriously.

My other job duties this evening included playing a Bach CD, handing out an application, cheerfully greeting people, making sure candy dishes were filled and other vital operations. At the end of the day, I lock the door and switch over the phones, filled with the bemused feeling of having done absolutely nothing of importance. Except perhaps to have made our house poet glow with the delight of hearing his words come alive once again.

Missing the Boat

2009-03-23T09:23:00.000-07:00

We narrowly escaped buying a boat last night. I was cozily lying propped up on pillows in our bed, happily reading for the hundredth time "The Diary of a Mad Housewife" when my cell phone rang, not five minutes after Keith had said good night and rung off.

"Where are you?" he asked, in this Voice. (He was hoping that I was still officially up and would go downstairs to look at this marvel of a boat. When I did anyway, he said in wonder, "You do love me!')

He began to talk about this boat he had found. One of my husband's hobbies is to cruise around on the Internet looking for vehicular bargains, so I am used to hearing him get all excited about the prospect of this boat or that truck.

This time was different, this time his voice was full of the light of certainty. "It's our boat, honey," he said. "This is the one."

That was when I made my way down through the dark house to the office and logged on, so I could see this thing. She was a very pretty boat with sleek, clean lines. She had a cabin underneath with a bedroom and a kitchenette and a stainless steel grill. Basically, something that we could live in for a week on the water, and yet go very, very fast when we wanted to. As well as grill out. No wonder he was so excited.

We made some quick negotiations. No new house, we stayed in this one, and no buying a new car, mine was perfectly fine for now and all paid off. Done and done; as far as he was concerned, he was almost willing to trade in the ATV for the boat.

That's when I realized the burden of financial responsibility would be on me. I would have to walk in the bank and ask for a loan on a boat. How could I get a loan? Who even asks for that in this kind of economy? I'd never gotten a loan before, how does that even work?

"It'll have to be in my name," I said slowly, realizing it. "I'm buying a boat. I don't want to buy a boat."

"Aw hon, I'll buy it back from you as soon as I get back," Keith said with a grin.

I didn't even bother trying to talk him out of it, as I had down with other purchases, it was too clear that this was indeed the boat. And I had promised him one, before he deployed. In fact, the entire time he was in the air on his way over there, he was day dreaming about the boat he would buy on his return.

The turning point was when I dropped a side comment, not even thinking, about how I would miss having a lot of land for a vegetable garden.

"I'll call him back," Keith said immediately. "We won't get it."

"You're sure?" I asked, amazed.

"Yeah," he said, his mind made up. "You were ready to walk right into a bank and ask for a loan. No, I'm good. I want my kitten to have her garden, and it's just too stressful for you to have to manage all the finances on your own."

So he called the man back and told him the deal was off, unless the boat was still there when he got back from his deployment, and then sent me an e-mail thanking me for being so understanding and supportive about the boat. I then sat here, wondering again how it was possible that God had given me this man as my husband.

March has simply flown by, it feels like the days have slipped past me with the ease of taking a breath and letting it out. And yet I've been fully alive in each day, outside in it, watching each small change take place.

I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is to hang off the back of the couch by the down stairs window and just dreamily look at the green grass growing thicker and taller in the front lawn. The dogs join me and I'm sure we make an interesting picture from outside, my head and the two girls, hanging over the couch, just looking at the great big world out there.

My geranium was hung outside for the first time yesterday, it was a gloriously hot and sunny day. That geranium has now lived almost a full year and has survived some close calls. As soon as we are free of the threat of snow (it might snow today), she will go right back out side for the rest of the summer, and I'll buy two more in hanging pots to decorate the edge of the deck roof.

I don't spend half as much time down here on line as I used to. I used to not even turn the computer off- I needed it on, and connected, or else I felt suffocated. The first thing I did in the morning would be to get up and check my e-mail, facebook and blog, and it would be the last thing I did at night.

Now sometimes an entire day can pass by without my even turning the computer on. I'm not doing anything exciting with my life, nor do I have some great social whirl of activities to keep me away. I don't know what it is. Sometimes it seems my entire life is lived on line and then there are long stretches of time where I'm so disconnected from it that I seem to be living in a different century.

When I look back at this month, I'll think mostly of being in the light, awash in it. And next week it will be April.

In the Neighborhood

2009-03-18T20:55:00.000-07:00

I go walking in my neighborhood every day now. The trees that were charcoal smudged are now hazed over with the most delicate green, almost like a mirage against the lucent sky. Last winter's leaves are gathered in scalloped ridges along the sidewalk edges, like icing on a wedding cake.

As soon as I leave the house, my body feels loose and long legged, I throw my head and shoulders back and my arms swing freely. I look a wreck; I wear Swedish leather walking shoes and jeans. I always wait to shower until after I get back, so my hair is generally in a messy braid that I wore the night before. My cell phone rides in the back pocket of my jeans and the house keys in the front.

The roads in my neighborhood wind in and around one another, all the houses share similar architectural traits, as though members of a large and messy extended family. There is the dominant split level layout and the three main windows facing front, as well as the attached, single garage.

I am guessing that they were all designed in the seventies. About one home owner per block got up one morning and decided to pain their house an outrageous shade of unmitigated blue. I often wonder what precipitated this decision.

I pass by one house that is beautifully tidy, the vibrantly green lawn hedged in by a chain link fence that gleams in the sun. The house boasts a small and brave dog of the curly haired variety. One day as I passed by I saw bath mats spread out tidily on the fence.

It gave me a sudden vision of the interior, all dim and incredibly neat, all the nicknacks gleaming and displayed in overflowing lighted cabinets, layered carpets and a lamp that hangs over the dining room table on a chain.

She makes toasted tuna fish sandwiches for lunch, she shops once a week, she speaks to her daughter in law on the phone and wonders why they never seem to get along. She has bathrooms that are all of one piece, where the toothpaste holder matches the frilly cloth shower curtain and the toilet seat is padded.

When I see their lawn, I feel bad for the houses next to it. The house to the left has covered their lawn completely with rocks, so one can only imagine. On top of the rock covered terraces have been placed terracotta circles like polka dots and on top of those have been placed sculptures of various winged insects and many, many ceramics frogs. I imagine that the dragonfly with clear blue wings was was a prized find.

I saw the lady of that house on her porch one morning. She was wearing a voluminous house dress in a vibrant blue that matched the paint job. She also was hanging rugs out to air on the porch railings; apparently the entire neighborhood has caught spring fever.

"You look happy!" she called out to me.

"It's the exercise," I replied with the grin.

People in my neighborhood like to fly flags that speak of their football loyalties, American patriotism and the fact that they like flowers. They like to have cars and trucks parked on the curb in a state of disrepair, a mark of either the perpetual optimist-"But hon, it just needs a little more work! I'll be able to get at least fifteen hundert for her..." or lethargy.

When I walk the neighborhood is silent and still, baking under the late morning sun. Hoses lay uncurled on lawns, windows are blank and empty, in the cool shadows under pine trees hide garden gnomes and cinder blocks. Dog bark, brave and mouthy; they hunt me all along the length of their fences, and then remain at the corner, alert should I decide to return.

Turning the corner, I see our own vehicle sitting at the curb, the short and stalwart Bronco, tan and brown, with the cracked windshield. The sight of it never fails to evoke such a longing for my husband that, for a moment, it becomes a physical sensation.

I remember his face, gleaming with sweat and splattered with oil and his fierce grin. I remember how solidly packed with muscle he is, the fact that he is a physical reality, not just a voice or a two dimensional picture.

By now, I know that I have forgotten so much of what he looks like, sounds like, what he is like to live with. I'm not conscious of it, I simply know because seeing him in December brought it all back and it's been long enough for it to have slipped all away again.

When he called me early this morning, he sounded cross. He was irritable from lack of sleep and frustrated over dealing with some money issues. I was still half asleep, my mind muddled with strange dreams.

I was drinking coffee at the kitchen table an hour later when the phone rang.

"Honey, I'm sorry I was cranky," he said remorsefully. "I couldn't sleep thinkin' on it."

He's getting ready to go somewhere else, involved in a different kind of mission. There won't be any kind of phone contact until they can run phone lines out. So at least I get his voice for now, all light and full of energy, or sweet and sleepy and rueful. How I love that man.

Tonight

2009-03-16T21:34:00.001-07:00

Driving home today, the sunset lay all mellow and silky against the mountain ridge, and it was seven in the evening. Seven, and the sky was a translucent blue at the zenith. When I open my door, a flurry of swallows flies up from the bottom of the lawn, where the water pools after I've watered. What they find so intriguing down there, I have no idea.

Various bushes and trees have put out tiny tongues of leaves, all furry and tentative and each day they unfurl a little more. There are even red, furry buds on the rose bushes and the tree that used to come only to the bottom of the bedroom window and now knocks against the upper glass panes is putting out buds. In a month or so, the sunlight will be filtered through the pale green leaves and it will remain cool and dim even in the afternoon.

"Hope we don't get a frost," said an elderly lady pragmatically. She was making her slow, hitching progress around my desk, as she does every day after dinner. "They'll all drop off."

I was left with the horror, and the evening's temperature, as checking it is her other evening ritual. Our resident French citizen was deeply upset this evening due to the fact that we did not organize a game of Skip-bo in lieu of the cancelled Jeopardy; we played a crossword puzzle instead.

"If it was in my own language, then maybe I could enjoy," she complained to me, leaning elegantly on her cane, waving one long figured hand in the air. She took herself off resignedly to bed after expressing her severe displeasure to the care manager whose misfortune it was to have made the decision.

I went on to lead the cross word puzzle, bellowing the clues out as loud as I could and was still unable to communicate clearly.

"23 three across," I said, gesturing a la Vanna White. "Sphere of influence," I then projected with all the force in my lungs. Bewildered cries began to rise from the gathered elderly.

"Spear?" "Near?" "What was that?" "I can't hear a thing!" "Fear!"

"No, no, SPHERE!" I shouted, making a circle with my hands.

"Oh, sphere....Orb?"

"No, as in, the Gladiator's sphere of influence!" I shouted back. (the word was arena) "It's a five letter word...." They all looked at me crossly under the unflattering florescent light. "We'll come back to that one later...moving on."

The EMTs were called, I have not been having the best of luck with them. On Friday I looked up from something or other to see a gathering of them around my desk. Normally I'm called before hand, so that I know where to direct them. Startled, I was barely able to remember what floor the room number was on.

Tonight when they arrived, I had the room number. Confidently I led the way to the elevator, the doors of which continued to open and close, open and close, while I and three large and imposing men carrying emergency equipment pretended that we were not all in a terrible hurry.

"Can you tell me a little about what happened?" asked one, as we were finally descending, as though offering me a chance to make up for the elevator malfunction.

I could and did, and proudly then I marched into the downstairs and led them all off into the wrong hallway. They were redirected and I scurried off to hide behind my desk.

"Goodnight, Jenny!" they said, as they left, striding past the desk.

"How do you know my name?" I wanted to ask. I mean, who really takes the time to read and then remember a name badge? "I'm sorry about leading you the wrong way," I said instead.

They did not break step, they swept through the doors and called over their shoulders, "No problem, we got where we needed to be."

And they were off, into the balmy, very early spring night to attend to other urgent calls at other retirement homes. Our little gathering of crossword playing elderly lingered on, long after the game was done and the words erased, drinking coffee and lemonade and chatting and the fact that they couldn't understand each other didn't matter a bit.

Coming Closer

2009-03-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

Over the past week or so I have collected five or six trash bags of leaves and debris from the lawn, and gotten into and then out of a huge argument with Keith that lasted about forty eight hours. The problem was that like WWII, it had more than one front and then there was the underlying war being fought behind the lines, the one over clashing principles and assumptions.

It was completely exhausting; at the end of day one my cell phone battery was completely drained and so was I. On that day our house didn't feel like my home, it felt strange and removed from me.

For years I had assumptions about commitment that were incorrect. I assumed that commitment happened naturally, that it was the natural expression of a good person. I thought of myself as a good person, and so therefore I would simply fall into commitment, in the same way that my hair grows out dark brown.

I think it was during the movie "Apollo 13" that the engineers at NASA had to frantically come up with a solution to a malfunction on the spaceship or the astronauts, floating helpless in their ship, would die. There was a scene when one engineer comes up to the others with a box, which he dumps on a table.

"This is what they have to work with," he said, or something to that effect. "We must find a solution with this."

That's what commitment feels like to me now. It means that Keith and I are bound together and we must work with what each of us brings to the table. There is no walking away, there is no throwing one's hands up in the air and saying that it's too hard or impossible, even though it might feel like that at the time.

I have heard it said, that marriage is like a mirror; it will show you things about yourself that you've never seen before. I've certainly experienced this to be true. The most amazing thing is that after everything we saw and had to face up to, we came through it together.

Not only that, but when it was over, I woke up to an e-mail from my husband thanking me for my ability to speak the truth into our relationship. I sat there, stunned. I have an incredible and amazing husband. He has the strength and honestly of a self made man.

I day dream about him coming home all the time now. The days are so deliciously long and full of light, it catches on the tangled, tawny grass of the front lawn that every day is shaded in a little greener. I feel like the sky goes on forever.

Having caught spring fever in a bad way, I spend hours outside. I drag the hose around the lawn, squatting down to undo the kinks and then leaping up out of the arc of water that is suddenly released. I sweep the debris from the white rock beds with a rapidly disintegrating straw broom and bag them up, using a pair of Keith's old gardening gloves.

We talk about the future and it feels real now, because it is no longer distant. We talk about him possibly choosing a new MOS, where we will live, what schools he might have to go to if he does change. Will we rent this house out or sell? Will we buy a new one or just a piece of land and put up a double wide out there, grow a big old vegetable garden and a couple of kids?

I don't know and all those day dreams are equally delightful simply because he will be home and we will be together and that is all that matters.

In contrast, I still remember the dismal, cloying days of winter, when it was hard to breathe and hard to move and I felt numb. It seemed at the time that it was going on forever, that I was bogged down in dark, dusty misery indefinitely. But time was passing by all along. I'll have to remember that for next time.

Memories

2009-03-09T21:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had to delete a text message from my cell phone; my inbox was full. It was painful to decide which one had to go. Reading through them brought back so many memories.

"Goodnight sweety, sorry so late, the tank just don't want to work"

That was sent last year, on May 11th. I was lying awake in my bed, the street light from the parking lot outside shining in through the blinds, the glowing numbers on the alarm clock telling me that I needed to fall asleep or else work would be hell. My dog Lynn was curled up at my feet.

I held the phone in my hand and for the millionth time tried to imagine what it would be like to meet him in person. What I imagined was not even close.

On July 2nd, he wrote simply "I miss my noun."

That was when I was in my parent's house the summer before it was renovated; the floors still sloped in conflicted directions, so that walking through the kitchen was reminiscent of walking on a wooden ship at sea. It creaked in the same way too, and the quality of the light was bright and clear, the old glass of the kitchen windows slightly flawed, blurring the view of the back yard.

I had forgotten how damp the air was on the East Coast; I gave up using face cream while I was there. Every morning I sat outside on the porch in the rocking chair, my bare feet up, reading books I hadn't read in years. Opposite me was the library where I had been a volunteer and as such, privy to their secret stash of chocolate.

While I was with my family, Keith was still with his in Indiana and not a day after I left him he had bought a brand new ATV and not a day after that he promptly ruined it by riding it into a lake, badly bruising his ribs in the process. (When he got home, he got all the water out of it by hanging it in the air, from the rafters of the garage, as though it were a gutted deer.)

Before I had left him, we had had a semi serious discussion about how he shouldn't treat me like an object. I can no longer remember what triggered this discussion, but I do remember that he ended it by saying solemnly, "No, I shouldn't; because you're a noun."

"A proper noun, in fact," I corrected him.

"My noun," he stated definitively, and that was that. And that also conveniently illustrates how successful the entire discussion was, actually. Oh well.

Two months into deployment, he sent me this one, "Here kitty kitty kitty." That one is self explanatory.

Three months in, at eleven thirty at night he sent me this one, "Wont be able to talk for a few days i love you so very much. I have a new mission."

I remember the fear and disquiet that washed over me and lasted for forty eight hours, until he called back. I remember sitting on the back porch in the late afternoon light, watching the newly bare tree branches being shaken by the wind. The light was dying away, day by day. There was left over Halloween candy on the kitchen counter.

"Honey I love you too please just relax you are working to hard. Everything will be great. I just love you," was sent in early December, after I had admitted to him that I was stressing out about getting everything perfect for his leave.

I had tried steam cleaning the downstairs with unexpected results and had spent more money that I ever would have guessed on a Christmas tree and assorted decorations. I was only days away from seeing him again. Now all those things are packed away in boxes, ready for next year.

The day he flew back to the sandbox, he sent me this: "You are such a little kitten.I love you so much. Have fun with your family you deserve it. You are my perfect wife i love you."

I was in the back seat of my car when I got this, my parents were driving and we were on a mission to find Hobby Lobby. I remember the hot sun and feeling of slight numbness, due from lack of sleep and having seen him off at the airport only that morning. We had lunch at Perkins after Hobby Lobby and then went and spent an ungodly amount of money at Target. I then went home and collapsed in my brand new bedroom.

"Kitty, I am really missing you right now. And I am tired." was the one that required another of its fellows to be deleted.

I was at work when I got that text, standing at the corner of my desk. It was in the evening and I was up to my eyebrows with updating things, as I always am. I read that and I wanted to beat against the bars of deployment with abandon, to wax poetic. If I could have packaged up my heart neatly with twine and brown paper packaging and mailed it, posthaste, I would have.

There will be more to come, so I have saved all of them on a file on the computer, to make room. That way, years from now, I can read them again and smile, remembering our crazy, wonderful, exhausting first year.

Down at Countrytown...

2009-03-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

Much to , I am sure, my brothers' dismay, I tend to listen to a great deal of country songs. I don't know how this happened; it just plain sneaked up on me. One day I'm listening to Keith's ring tone telling me that it's a good day to run and the next I'm listening to the songs nonstop on the radio all day.

And it got me thinking, what if there were such a place as Countrytown, USA? Could there be a place where turnip greens are sold from a flat bed Ford and movie stars fall in love with a glass of sweet tea?

These are not the only road blocks to be careful of, if you do decide to visit Countrytown; watch out for the International Harvester. Remember that road runs right through his pay load and it hasn't exactly been a bumper crop for him this year, so be polite and just wave; I mean, after all, the poor guy's been married to the farmer's daughter for ten years now.

Meanwhile, down the road a kid is flying up the drive, laying on the horn and while he might be a hayseed farmer without even a row to hoe, he does have a lot of potential to grow up into a slightly cranky, overprotective father in twenty years or so.

But that's just love and there's a lot of that going around; if you do decide to go fishing, watch out for the great troubadour George because he's got the boat, he's got the paddle and gosh darn it, he can make it float; I have no doubt.

This is mainly because those cowgirls, how about them? Out on those wide open places and in honky tonks drinking whiskey and demanding that they play something country, boy, aren't they something? And cowgirls don't cry, this is their number one rule of thumb no matter what.

Though a few may be waiting behind the door at home with gun powder and shells or possibly burning down the house on Independence Day while their children are off at the fair, but that's just how country justice goes down out here.

Down in town you may come across a welcome home parade or some lemonade, but if you do go down there, watch out for those country boys because they are roving around in droves; you will know them by their trucks.

They may already have a girl, and if so, they'll be riding in the center of the seat hollering "Turn it up!" or possibly in the bed of the truck, where they are being taken for a ride. It is worthwhile noting that these boys are lonely in their new deer stands and also can cure a ham. Especially watch out for the ones wearing camo pants, they are very hard to resist if you are a city girl.

You can come across love sick boys all over the place, even at the local airport where they are draped across their truck, looking at the caramel colored sky or even driving around wildly, pounding on the dash and looking at the sunset in the rear view mirror while sobbing and shouting out loud. So please, be careful if you are driving anywhere.

They can find comfort however, under the light of the neon moon where, we have heard, the girls are back from Saginaw; yee haw! If they are really lucky, they may be able to make a trip to Margarettaville, where we know that it is always five o'clock somewhere, but they should take care to have the appropriate foot ware available, such as flip flops, as accidents can and will happen without them.

And they deserve the break, because typically these boys are slaving away at a big ol' pile of shift work, we're talking, seven to three, three to eleven, eleven to seven, so if they take a lunch break that lasts all day, well, just remember there may be hell to pay, but they haven't had a day off in a year, so they're due.

It may be a tough life sometimes, but people down here enjoy the simple things in life, like the sound of the cooler slushin' and watching their corn pop up in rows; they certainly insist on their chicken fried. They enjoy painting the water tower John Deere green, spending their evenings with nothing but the radio on and drunk calling their ex's at closing time, frequently with a glass of Johnie Walker Red beside them.

Just remember that, at Countrytown, USA, you may have been able to avoid the pain, but you would have missed the dance and no matter what, down here, one can always count on having friends in low, low places. So go demand beer for your horses and whiskey for your men and just know that it's all part of an itty bitty scheme.

That's Life

2009-03-06T17:13:00.001-08:00

Today a soldier in ACUs walked right into work.

Now, I know that when I go to Walmart around pay day that I'm going to see some soldiers in ACUs, alone or with their families; in fact, any time I go in, I prepare myself for the possibility. Needless to say, when I go on post I prepare for this as well.

But at work! There I am, at my desk happily inputting data when I look up and see a soldier entering the building. It was like a mirage.

And he wasn't just visiting, either; he came to deliver a cold coffee drink to his girl and hung around my desk while waiting eagerly to see her, making small talk about our house dog.

Two of him could have fit into any one of my husband's ACUs and he was very young, but still! The final blow came when, right in front of my desk, he kissed his girl and said he would see her later. He would see her later!! She got to see her guy later. Not, five and a half months later, just later. I'd almost forgotten all about how that word could be used.

I wished at that point then to wail and kick my heels like a small child having a tantrum in the back seat.

Not only that, but also today a fellow wearing a jacket that identified him as belonging to the Air force came in, lost and looking for directions to a building that was located a mile and a half south.

Sigh. I wish to officially thank Life for reminding me twice today that my man is in the military and far, far away from me. Thank you, Life. Point taken.

Fortunately, my fellow Army wife and deployment buddy came by and I could vent to her.

"We're more than half way done!" she said encouragingly, and told me that our guys will be home about a month sooner than I was expecting; she goes to the FRG meetings. But I'm trying really hard not to count on that, because, really, who knows? But I do keep secretly hoping that he'll come home at least a little bit early.

Every day driving home, I face an oncoming stream of soldiers driving off post, most in large trucks and SUVs, some in small, sporty cars and two or three daring ones on motorbikes. That doesn't bother me so much, actually.

I like to think of all those soldiers able to go home to family and dinner; it's a comforting thought. It won't be too much longer before my man is one of them.

These days...

2009-03-03T09:33:00.000-08:00

...I am often serenaded by the swinging, jazzy sounds of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, to name a few. It's such mellow, rich music.

My time line has turned into a massive thing and I will have to break it down into several parts; local culture, America in whole, and the war abroad.

That way, I will know at a glance that in the summer of 1943 when Helen was leaving the movie theaters after watching "Lassie Come Home" with her pals, Red was with the 1st ID in the battle for Sicily because Winston Churchill convinced America to go through Africa and not directly into Europe, effectively sealing the fate of Central and Eastern Europe.

In the meantime, Helen pays with pennies made out of steel, because of a shortage of copper and listens to Frank Sinatra sing "Strangers in the Night." She's thirty years old, with a Victory Garden the back yard and taking very good care of her shoes, because they've been rationed and new ones are hard to get.

I watched a clip of "The World at War" and nearly wept at the fall of Poland. The country was cut in two between Germany and Russia and only Warsaw was able to hold out; for three weeks the city defiantly played the Polish National Anthem while under unrelenting bombardment. But the city was decimated and on September 23rd the music stopped.

In more current news, my cold is almost gone and I'm left with only a chapped, red nose. It was suppose to be sunny today, but the sky is covered with a thin film of cloud that thins down the light. I was going to be busily productive and clean the floors and the window sills and rake the front yard and buy stamps, but so far I have yet even to get dressed. Oh well, I'll blame it on the lingering effects of the common cold.

Keith has got semi official word that he will be moving somewhere else soon, along with the rest of his company. There is no Internet where he'll be and he doesn't know for sure if there will be phones. That sounds crazy. How can there not be phones? There must be.

There won't be any other Americans. He can't tell me what he will be doing and my darling Staff Sergeant is not a man that knows how to paint a rosy picture; he always tells it like it is and apparently it is dangerous.

So there is a chance that I will finish out this deployment reduced to letter writing while he is out in the dangerous middle of no where. How ironic. I really didn't want to take my research quite this seriously.

I just let the dogs out and it is actually warmer outside than it is in the house. I'm going to throw some clothes on and go out for walk and try not to dread the future quite so much. At least I can always distract myself with the past. It's pretty amazing actually, how comforting the past can be with its larger perspective.

Research and the Homefront

2009-02-28T09:18:00.000-08:00

I have been wandering around the house in bathrobe, tissue paper and plastic bag carried close. It's only a head bug and so I have been spared the inevitable intimacy with the toilet that would have otherwise developed.

I got up this morning to find a message in my inbox from someone I had not seen before. Curious of course, I opened it and discovered it was from a company asking if I would write a review for their product on my blog, for payment or for a free sample.

"Someone wants to pay me for my writing!" I gasped. "My first writing inspired pay!"

And then I looked more closely at the product. It was an enhancer for men... Not sure, really, how I would have reviewed the product, since the necessary equipment is not exactly...at hand.

Sometime this month our Bissel vacuum cleaner gasped its last, dusty breath. I wasn't really fond of the thing, it seemed to spew out as much dirt as it was picking up and it was always covered with a thin film of grit. It had many parts that needed to be taken out and cleaned and then dried and then wedged back into place, with much effort and some profanity.

I complain like this and yet, not so long ago, I would have been dragging the rugs outside and beating them on a line with a broom.

I saw the funniest clip about a comedian who was talking about a recent flight and the young person beside him had been complaining about how horrible the flight was because it was delayed for twenty minutes and then they had sat on the runway for another forty.

"And then what happened?" asked the comedian sarcastically. "Did you fly?? Did you fly though the air??? You were in a chair....in the sky!!" (I'm paraphrasing)

How quickly we can lose the wonder of things.

In any case, when I told Keith about the vacuum cleaner, his response was that we could fix it together, over the phone.

"I thought about that," I confessed wryly. "But then I decided that destroying our marriage over a vacuum cleaner probably wouldn't be worth it."

He dismissed this fear as groundless. "Just do exactly what I tell you," he said. A short five minutes later he sighed and admitted that the vacuum was indeed broken. Our marriage escaped unscathed.

I reminded him of the housecleaning situation yesterday and his voice became light with boyish enthusiasm. "I knew I had set some money aside for somethin'!" he exclaimed. "Hon, I'm gonna do some research...unless, do you wanna pick it out?"

"No, no," I said nasally, prostrate on the bed where my head cold had left me amid the litter of discarded tissues. "I wouldn't have the faintest idea which one was better and I know you love doing this kind of research."

Several hours later he called again. "Hon, now, don't be angry," he started off humbly.

"Oh no," I groaned, getting off the bed and put my fingertips to the window, as though this might help me bring him closer. "What did you do?"

Inwardly, I was recalculating all our expenses. "We'll be fine," I was reassuring myself, "we'll pay it off monthly...we can afford monthly payments..."

It turned out he had bought a second hand Kirby at an astoundingly good price and as he rattled off all the attachments, the guarantees, the qualifications of the on line site where he had bought it, my heart swelled up with so much love for him that I thought it might burst like a balloon.

"...an'," he continued, excited, "it even has this motor where it senses if you're gonna push or pull an' it goes with your motion. I thought that might help with your back. An' it's got this heppa... somethin'...where it blocks the dust from comin' back out an' I thought that might help you with being sick an' all..."

I love the sound of his voice when it is all light and unselfconscious. I love how he says the word "hundred," as in, "It was just three hundert and fifty..."

It reminds me vividly of his youth; he so often looks and sounds at least ten years older than he is. And that is dear to me as well, but when his voice is all light I'm reminded that I have a young and virile husband somewhere out there in the world. And maybe he can't come home and take care of me when I am sick and warm our cold, too large bed, but he can spend hours finding me just the right vacuum cleaner when he should be sleeping.

"You are such a good husband!" I exclaimed, in wonder at the fact of it.

"Well hon," he replied, surprised. "You're such a wonderful wife!"

I have been doing research on my story, I have a timeline and character studies going. During the day and often the night I am wrestling with what happens. How did they meet? I get side tracked by small questions, like, if they met because her car broke down, what car would she be driving? Why would she be driving it alone? How could her family afford a car in the thirties?

And then I spend hours on line doing research and not writing a single word. But I do know interesting things about that time, like the fact that food was rationed at a time when America was producing more food than they ever had before in history and that Monopoly came out then and when Congress was debating whether or not America would get involved in World War II (before Pearl Harbor) a group of mothers sat outside the session, wearing black veils over their faces in wordless protest.

I have discovered her name and fortunately, it is not Kitty. Her name is Helen Sophia Carr. Her father is the dean of a small college in the mid west, her mother is on women's committees and wears brooches on her ample chest.

Helen's husband is known as Red but she calls him Everett. His family has a repair shop the next town over and when he is not working on cars, he plays checkers. He keeps a board in his ruck sack and he played on the beaches of Omaha, in the days after D-Day, with buddies from his company, using bottle caps for missing pieces, faces grubby and exhausted, before they were reorganized and sent out for the next battlefield. In his letters, he calls her, "My darling girl..."

I suspect that I am capable of doing research indefinitely and at some point will have to actually force myself to begin writing.

Oh, and tomorrow I will be able to say that Keith will be home in five months and thirty days. Five months! (and thirty days-I highly discount the days in order to maintain moral.)

I see the light at the end of the tunnel.