Homeward Bound

Today is our one-year anniversary here in Texas. I am going to use this occassion to explain what Homeward Bound means to me. I grew up in Oswego, NY. It was a great place to grow up and I had a great life there. When I was 20 I was working three jobs and only going to college part-time. I decided to join the Army and take a look around at what might be out there in the wide, wide world. I loved California and Germany, but not drill sergeants and PT. So two years, one hubby, and one baby-on-the-way later I was a civilian again. Since that time we have moved several times. We've lived in Texas (four times), Germany (three times), Maryland (twice), California (a second time around), and North Carolina. Now our little family is up to two kids, two dogs, four cats and a fish. We still enjoy moving and the adventures that await us in our new homes, but it is getting harder and harder to leave the places we love and the friends we know.

When we first moved to Fayetteville, NC we felt like we were "home" right away. We had family there and had been to Fayetteville several times to visit. We were on the east coast and it was easy to drive home to Oswego. We bought a house for the first time. We love that house. It was absolutely perfect for our family. We lived there for four years and enjoyed every day we were there. But the alure of a 1SG job and the idea of making CSM faster called to us and we packed up to move to Texas.

Selling a house alone in NC while my dear hubby bought a house alone in TX was not fun. Driving from NC to NY to AL to TX alone with the kids & pets was not fun either. Our trip was stressful and too eventful. The trip began with a tragedy and ended with our being robbed in Houston. We finally arrived here on a beautiful, warm, December day. It took months to adjust but we made it through. A lot has changed in the past year in my life and in the lives of the people I love. You know who you are. And I love you. Midway through our first year here we had a trip planned to visit our family. Although most of our vacation was very enjoyable, it too was touched by tragedy.

Now it is a year later. The boys are back in school and I am going to college. I started finals week today. I took two classes last summer and six this fall. I am taking seven in the spring so you can expect lots of complaining! I am working furiously towards my degree in teacher education...trying to get it done before the Army decides to move us again.

It has been a long year, but we are still moving forward. We are still homeward bound...

My friend Cherie has a blog and I just fell in love with being able to stay closer to her and her kids through it. The post that hooked me was a post about her son A.J. and his Halloween costume. A.J. was one of my students at the preschool where I taught in NC. If you know A.J. you would know that this post is so A.J. ... and so cute. She had convinced me to sign up for blogger a few months earlier, but I hadn't done anything with it except write comments on her blog.

As we were driving away from our friends I decided to start blogging for real. And as we were driving westward across the country I thought of the name Homeward Bound. It was so ironic that I wanted to be driving either north towards NY or at least east back to NC. And here I was, having just been robbed in Houston, driving west through Texas.

I feel like that is how my life has been for the last 13 years. We have packed up and moved so many times that it seems normal. We have lived in so many places that I have literally been driving to Wal-Mart and had to stop and think about which state I was in! (Yes, this has really happened to me and no, I am not taking any strange medications)

But always we are homeward bound. Always my heart is in the back yard at my parents' house on a warm summer day. The grass is so green it looks like a crayon. The air is clean, the sky is blue, and the lake is only a few blocks away. I am surrounded by my loved ones and blissfully happy just being there. There are no agendas, no schedules, no worries. Just my family and my home.

I don't know how many times we will move with the Army before we get there. But we'll get there. We'll get there eventually ... because we are always homeward bound.