December 28, 2010

Okay, so Christmas was a few days ago, but I always seem to be fashionably late. So, I won’t hold this tardiness against myself. We had a nice, quaint Christmas this December, to reserve ourselves for a much larger celebration in February after we move back to Iowa.

We had several gift exchanges with our closest friends, and a small dinner at the Flowers’s house. We baked cookies for Santa Claus, and opened the few gifts we bought in the morning. Luckily for us parents, our children are still too young to get so excited they wake up at six in the morning. We didn’t unwrap our presents until almost nine o’clock. It was wonderful!

The coming and going of Christmas brings us closer to the close of the current year, and the start of the next. Like most people, our family is excited at the promise the new year will bring. We’ll be closing the book on Jesse’s Active Duty enlistment, and moving back to a place that we’ve only visited a handful of times in the last four years.

It’s exciting to wonder how much the places and faces may have changed in our hometowns. But there are also trepidations. We have no clue what the employment outlook is there, although Jesse does have a job lined up at the warehouse where he used to work. We aren’t sure where we’ll settle, but we do have temporary housing set for us. And since we’ve moved, many of our family and friends have also grown and moved on. I’m not sure how strong my support system will be.

I’m going to miss a lot of the people that I met here at Camp Lejeune, and throughout Jesse’s entire enlistment. I’ve made many friends along the way, and thankfully I keep in contact with almost all of them. They saw me through days and nights when I was bored, lonely, nervous, and even at times on the verge of a breakdown.

I couldn’t have done what I did, survived what I experienced, and become the woman that I am without everyone’s support. I didn’t attend college, so these ladies (and a few men) are my sorority sisters. Sisters in silent arms. I wish that I could just package all of them up and take them along with me.