The packers have come and gone, the house was cleaned and the checkout completed.
Now I sit and wait…I’m temporarily homeless, although I have a roof over my head (thanks to a fellow military spouse and friend). My only belongings are those I have in my suitcase as the rest sit in storage at our future destination.
I have two weeks of this quiet lull, two weeks to just be. Then it will be off to visit family before beginning our next leg…our two-week travel from west to east. We’ll be stopping often and enjoying the sites, visiting friends and fellow military families, seeing children and grandchildren and trying not to think of the chaos of what is the end of our PCS.
My next blog will be the adventures of traveling cross country…hopefully I’ll get a chance to get online and share our trip with those that read this blog, perhaps I’ll even have pictures to add…Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Six Flags Over Texas, New Orleans, the grandkids, WDW, and various other stops along the way. Some may even include good friends we have made over the years, as we stop and say “Hi” along the way.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Friday, July 8, 2011
We interrupt my regularly scheduled blog to bring you…
It’s PCS time!
We have spent this past week going through things in the hopes that we can downsize to a manageable weight and are able to get rid of the things we have been hauling from duty station to duty station.
It is amazing how much of our life is in boxes. As I go through, I find pictures that chronicle our lives, from the time my husband joined the Coast Guard, when the children were babies until they reach adulthood, each of our duty stations, the friends we made, the things we did up until our current home. I sat with my daughter, sharing where each of the pictures were taken, asking her if she knew the people in them, or if she remembered the trips and outings we had went on…of course, being the youngest, she doesn’t remember most of them. “Do you remember this person, she would babysit you when we lived in Kodiak?” or “You loved hanging out with these friends in Kentucky”. No, she has no memory, not of the people in the pictures or of the place, which is a reminder that I should have stayed in closer contact after we moved away. Perhaps I should have kept the memories alive by pulling these pictures out more often, instead of packing them away in a box, putting the duty station behind us, never to be revisited until another PCS forces us to go through the boxes again.
I’ve sorted some of the pictures so that each of the kids can have the memories of past duty stations that were so much a part of their lives. The pictures that show not only the events, and the places they occurred, but the people involved, whether they remember them or not. Perhaps the pictures will trigger memories, or maybe they will talk to each other about them seeing who remembers what. Hopefully, they will learn from them, and as they transfer from one station to the next, they will keep the memories alive for their children, so as they grow their children will remember those that influenced their growing up years.
The movers come on Monday and another duty station with its memories will be put in boxes. I’ll have to remember to bring them out more often.
We have spent this past week going through things in the hopes that we can downsize to a manageable weight and are able to get rid of the things we have been hauling from duty station to duty station.
It is amazing how much of our life is in boxes. As I go through, I find pictures that chronicle our lives, from the time my husband joined the Coast Guard, when the children were babies until they reach adulthood, each of our duty stations, the friends we made, the things we did up until our current home. I sat with my daughter, sharing where each of the pictures were taken, asking her if she knew the people in them, or if she remembered the trips and outings we had went on…of course, being the youngest, she doesn’t remember most of them. “Do you remember this person, she would babysit you when we lived in Kodiak?” or “You loved hanging out with these friends in Kentucky”. No, she has no memory, not of the people in the pictures or of the place, which is a reminder that I should have stayed in closer contact after we moved away. Perhaps I should have kept the memories alive by pulling these pictures out more often, instead of packing them away in a box, putting the duty station behind us, never to be revisited until another PCS forces us to go through the boxes again.
I’ve sorted some of the pictures so that each of the kids can have the memories of past duty stations that were so much a part of their lives. The pictures that show not only the events, and the places they occurred, but the people involved, whether they remember them or not. Perhaps the pictures will trigger memories, or maybe they will talk to each other about them seeing who remembers what. Hopefully, they will learn from them, and as they transfer from one station to the next, they will keep the memories alive for their children, so as they grow their children will remember those that influenced their growing up years.
The movers come on Monday and another duty station with its memories will be put in boxes. I’ll have to remember to bring them out more often.
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