June 17th

It's Father's Day.

I'm grateful I have a dad who is always there to hear all about my existential angst. In fact, he insists that he actually enjoys being able to do that. Thank goodness.

Yesterday, we went to a birthday party in the afternoon.

I was in charge of the ice cream. This picture was taken moments before placing a scoop of rocky road into an unsuspecting guest's hand.

Ice cream- it's slippery. Be warned.

The birthday girl, right after taking a swing at a cupcake pinata- with a billy club someone brought home as a memento from their tour in Iraq.

She turned five. I remember when she was turning two.

Earlier that morning, Keith and I went out riding. It was just a tad bit muddy out there. Keith is proudly pointing to my hand print, clearly marked out in mud on his shirt.

We had one hour between ATV excursion and birthday party.

I'm not sure how, but in an hour, all the clay was out of my hair and I was party ready, with purse, birthday gift and a late and much needed cup of coffee in hand.

The night before, we had friends over and played games on the lawn until it got too dark to see. This game is officially called Bolango Ball, but we dubbed it Flam Flam, or Fling.

You can see why.

The men.

The women.

Totally posed shot showcasing Team Indiana. Go team! Way to artificially create a photo-moment.

Ugh. I'm still clearly not comfortable being photographed all the time.

However, I am getting better at remembering to take them, and there's lots more summer to go.

March 26th

I have survived the airport and the visit, as you can see.

However, I can tell I'm not going to survive this new key board I'm trying to use. Why must people make the space bar stiff? Do they not realize how darn often a person hits it?

Okay, that's better; apparently it had to get broken in. Also, the keyboard is ergonomic, and so it's higher at the bottom than at the top, and split down the middle at a strange angle that actually does feel comfortable, but throws my typing off.

Anyway, enough minutia of the modern writer. I could just as easy be complaining about the dullness of my quill and the cheap, watered down quality of my ink.

I was so terrified of having to drive at the airport drop-off that my mouth was actually dry. That sort of took me by surprise- it's been a while since I've been that scared.

I managed to kiss Keith, climb into the driver's seat and pull away from the curb.

My verse that day had included the phrase:

"...and all our busy rushing ends in nothing...And so, Lord, where do I put my hope? My only hope is in You." (from psalm 39)

So, I slowed my racing thoughts down, determined not to rush, and focused on one task at a time, the first of which was find to find the highway.

The roads were mostly clear of traffic and the signs were impossible to miss, and before I knew it, I was on the highway. It was so easy that I had to check the road signs to be sure that I was already exactly where I needed to be.

I must say, that Keith, already quite attractive to me, grew only more so as the weekend passed by. He is so tall! And so young! And he stands so endearingly slouched ever so slightly- not as though he is discouraged, but merely because he is easy and confident in his own space.

Which caused me also to want to be in his space, and each time I put myself there, he looked down at me with his twinkling blue eyes and welcomed me in. He likes to have me around.

This weekend he got into the pool. The children could barely be restrained from it, even at nine o'clock on a sunny morning in March. By noon, they were in, with squeals and splashes, and shortly thereafter, my intrepid husband followed them.

He was the only adult that did. In vain he attempted to persuade us that the water was "not that cold." I easily spotted his attempts to lure me toward the edge, so that he could pull me in. I know his potential, pool side treachery, and all his sweet talk could not get me any closer than three feet to the shimmering blue water, and his strong, wet arms.

Keith and I, used to the quietness and order of two adults in the house, were at times bewildered by the maze of noise, energy and motion that was constantly flowing around and in and out of the house, and left its evidence behind in every corner.

In the mornings, there were always at least two or three bodies curled up on the couches, blankets slipping off, bodies soft and loose and unguarded in sleep. And then, the wail of the youngest, a tow headed boy of two who would not be parted from his father at any time.

"Da!" he would holler urgently, his blanket clutched up under his elbow. "Da!"

He used "Yeah," for every other communication necessary.

It was a very laid back, comfortable visit. It reminded me of summer camp- people lined up to use the showers, fresh air blowing through the house, voices calling, damp towels draped over the back of the dining room chairs.

Keith and I have obviously become the stop off point for friends and family traveling further south- a way station, if you will. I like it. Travellers to the sunny shores stop here to catch their breath before tumbling on into Florida.

One of these days we'll have to try and make it down there ourselves.

March 22nd

I have a busy weekend coming up.

On Friday night, a family of seven people will arrive from points north and will stay until Sunday morning.

In fact, the time of their departure for the Florida shores will coincide perfectly with Keith's, for the airport.

He will drive there, but I must drive back and the dread of this has been like a long, cold shadow lying over my entire week.

I don't like driving; I am not a good driver and airports are the enemy.

Of course, my dozens of flights to and from the Orient did take the edges off my initial and paralyzing terror, but I still don't like driving a car anywhere in their vicinity.

A couple nights ago, another military wife assured me that the airport is on this side of Atlanta and that there are not that many exits and connections- it's pretty much a straight shot.

Keith confirmed this, so my anxiety has decreased considerably.

That military wife had stopped by with her husband, at Keith's eager invitation, to see the progress he's made on his very own electric motor boat, which he made out of two pieces of packing Styrofoam, two helicopter engines (the helicopters themselves having long since been ruined), duct tape and hot gun glue.

It actually works.

I chatted with the wife for a while, leaning against the kitchen counter, while the soldiers dissected their electronic toys in the garage.

This wife has a sleepy, laid back personality and sloe eyes, with tawny, wavy bangs that fall into her face. She wore bicycle shorts with a long tunic over them and a short cardigan over that and a mauve, middle Eastern scarf wound round her neck.

Two minutes after entering the house, she'd kicked her moccasins off and was going comfortably bare foot. I always am, myself. It was our second visit, so we were pretty familiar with each other and our various interests.

Her husband is a thin, wiry chap from the back woods of New England and an avid hunter of any animal, by any sanctioned weapon.

Eventually, we wandered outside and watched the men as they leaned over the apparent wreck of their RC cars- tiny, glittering parts strewn across the open tailgate, plastic bodies removed, to reveal the tangle of wire and rubber tubing that make up the minuscule engines.

We waved away moths, lazily, and talked about keeping our men on a reasonable spending plan, when it came to their vehicular hobbies, and the men grinned and pretended not to listen. They are managed men and they know it and they must pretend not to love it.

When they left, she insisted on giving me a hug, though I am not by nature a hug-able person. She seems to like me. This sort of thing always takes me by surprise.

Now I must prepare for another visit, one of an entirely different sort. I'll think of it like a water slide; I just have to take a deep breath, tuck my elbows in and go with the flow. It might even be fun, who knows.

March 5th

This was my verse for the day:

"The Lord is faithful in all He says; He is gracious in all He does. The Lord helps the fallen and lifts up those bent beneath their loads."

-Psalm 145:13-14 NLT

Our guests arrived around three in the afternoon on Saturday. The fellow was a gangly farm boy with a baseball cap, large glasses and a wide smile. He rarely spoke, but watched everything quietly.

I was much more interested in his woman. She was older; her face had that faintly worn look of someone in middle age and her hands were roughened. Her hair was thick, tauny and long, and her eyes were large and shy.

Right away I noticed that she had the same quality of social awkwardness as myself. It wasn't glaring; in her case, it was as though she were somewhat off beat- her conversation moved unexpectedly between untaught directness and shyness.

As for myself, I tried to remain in the moment, and not rush on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, in the hopes of pushing time along faster, so that I could get through it as fast as possible.

I kept taking deep, slow breaths and settling myself back into the conversation and the setting. It was much more peaceful that way and I was able to even enjoy some of the socializing.

When we were in the kitchen, her demeanor changed. There is something about being in a kitchen, I have noticed, that causes most women to open up. The quiet ones will get chatty and the chatty ones will go nonstop.

This whole time I had been listening with one ear for the voice of Jesus. It's as though I have one foot in what I can see is happening, and one foot somewhere else. I do this because otherwise, I tend to judge and catagorize the people I meet according to my own expectations and understanding, which is incredibly limited.

I'm constantly reminding myself that this person I'm speaking to is a beloved daughter of God- His own creation, with a history and scars and knowledge and experience very different from my own. I don't know her story, so I don't know who she really is. But what I can always know, is that she is beloved of God, as we all are.

So, I was in the kitchen slicing up tomatoes, and I leaned back into Jesus yet again, in order to ground myself, and He whispered to me, Here is another little girl.

He meant, another little girl like myself- someone who survived the ravages of their childhood.

It was true, too. Little pieces of her childhood kept dropping into the conversation, which was becoming more unconventional, as we became more comfortable being ourselves.

I've rarely had such a connection with another person in the same way. It amazed me, looking back, to notice how much of my inner self I had revealed. It wasn't so much what we were saying, it was how we were being.

My conversation with my guest had been full of emotion, vulnerablity and authenticity, no matter what topic we had been discussing. Any other person would have found it strange, with the long, quiet pauses and palpable emotion.

I kept leaning into Jesus and listening, during my conversations with her. Maybe times I wanted to talk about Him with her, but not as though to evangelize- it was perfectly obvious, even with my limited perception, that she was His girl. I wanted to talk about Him simply because I wanted to share my delight in Him, but we didn't have enough time to get to that level of sharing.

It came up once, briefly, when she was telling me about her son's name.

"It's in the Bible," she said to me in her direct way, but her eyes shimmered with a sort of private pleasure.

I looked at her swiftly from the corner of my eye. Everything that I wanted to say was too much to be said, and I couldn't grab a hold of where to begin.

"Indeed it is," I replied instead, my eyes twinkling.

When they left the next day, she came up to my desk, as though she had an important and deliberate message to deliver.

"I enjoyed meeting you," she said simply. As she spoke, her childlike pleasure was balanced by her natural dignity. "I hope that we'll meet again soon."

It was not a social phrase, it was genuine, and thus unvarnished and unstudied. I understood the importance of it as well, because of the things she had shared with me earlier.

I paused to consider. This is the sort of thing I would never do, normally, but that is what I meant by our conversation being unconventional. As I paused, I realized that I also hoped very much that we would meet again. I sat up straight.

"I hope so," I said, my eyes bright with the undisguised pleasure of it.

Her own eyes suddenly shone bright and beautiful and then her shoulders hunched into themselves. Her shyness washed over her and she had to look away. We waved to each other and then they were gone on their way further South.

As they drove away, I felt a wash of fear for her, because of her innocence and childlike nature. She could be hurt so easily- what would happen to her?

I felt Jesus' loving presence; He did not have to say anything. All my fears dissolved at once into a sort of tender humor at myself.

First of all, she'd already been through incredible suffering; her strength was of that shining sort that had been tried in the crucible. But most importantly, Jesus would be with her no matter where her life took her. She would always be in His hands.

And now it is a sunny Monday morning, and I am going to go out and see what is blooming in the park.

November 27th

We are back. My body is still sore from two days of eight hour car travel and two nights on the air mattress. The morning sun is falling through the blinds and I am wearing the flannel PJs that my parents got me for my birthday.

I opened the present early, not wanting to pad around in someone else's house wearing Keith's ancient T shirt and mismatched, stained PJ pants that I normally wear to bed.

Yesterday morning, before we left Indiana, I didn't bother to brush my hair; I just left it in the braid that I'd slept in. I thought I looked pretty normal until we stopped somewhere in Tennessee and I saw myself in the streaky mirror.

The loose strands of my extremely long hair had been whipped up like an airy chiffon all around my face. What remained of the braid itself looked like road kill.

That's when I understood the strange looks I'd been getting at the gas station. I down right frightened some meek, middle aged woman with coiffed hair and soft leather handbag later on during the day, when my hair had had time to get worse.

Returning from the restroom, I made a bee line across the tarmac to the dusty Civic, weighed down with luggage and the speakers Keith had purchased from his brother.

Through the bug streaked windshield, I could see Keith and the dim outline of the dogs, their heads hanging over the front seats. I felt an upwelling of affection for the little group that awaited me, dog breath and all.

"Hello, family," I said cheerfully, opening my door.

"Hello, woman," Keith replied affectionately.

He picked up the stuff that I had been carrying on my lap, to make room for me to sit down in my spot.

Our car rejoined the stream of fellow Americans who were returning home from family get togethers and cramped sleeping arrangements one day early, hoping to avoid the traffic on Sunday. We flipped down the visors against the glare of the late November sun and settled in for the long haul.

Thanksgiving itself went well. We left the house at four thirty in the morning and did not see the sun until we'd reached the Chattanooga valley. By noon, we'd reached southern Indiana and our first turkey dinner of the day.

That dinner we ate on couches, casually, with the dogs underfoot amid decorative ivy plants, ruffled curtains and a welcoming apple motif in the kitchen.

I met the newest member of the family, a handsome little fellow with adorable red hair and the Indiana family chin. He got passed around a lot and was very tolerant of all the attention.

One of Keith's brothers couldn't eat anything but mashed potato because he'd smashed the left side of his face with a maul, trying to detach a tire from its rim by whaling on it.

The heavy hammer hit the rubber and sprung back into his cheek bones, fracturing two of them and causing his entire face to swell up to twice its size.

Eventually, we all alighted from there and regrouped at the second household for more turkey dinner, this time in a much more formal setting.

That house sits ensconced in a solid and quiet setting of rolling green fields, amid other prosperous Hoosiers who have build red brink houses with two or three car garages and multiple roof angles.

This house and its setting are as welcoming as a leather Lay-Z-Boy recliner. We left the dogs in the two and a half car garage and headed into a house scented by holiday cooking.

There was a walnut studded cheese ball on the bar in the game room, a display of ceramic pumpkins behind the glass cabinets in the kitchen and a football game on the huge TV above the fireplace.

Although I feel at home in this house, I retreated to my usual bolt hole- the love seat where the magazine basket is placed, heaped with holiday Crate and Barrel and Coldwater Creek catalogues. These, and a woman's devotional Bible, NIV and a book on heaven were my reading material.

I began in retail, made my way quickly through paradise and ended up in Exodus, fascinated as usual by the exchanges between the Lord God Almighty and Moses.

People swirled around me in little knots, gathering and regathering in the kitchen or the game room, or beside the bar, to make another whiskey cocktail.

We ate smoky and spicy chicken wings, a specialty of Keith's dad and then Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings, a specialty of Keith's step mother, both equally delicious. Then the family got down to the real business of the night- the Indiana family poker game.

It was a good Thanksgiving and now we are home and I am about to turn thirty four. At thirty four, the age of forty emerges from the shadows of the far distant future and becomes a distinct possibility. Maybe by then I'll have finished my darn story.

June 27th

Thank God for Monday. This weekend was so busy. We had a pool party on Saturday, so there was much cleaning and preparing to do early on Saturday and the guests stayed until eight pm.

As usual, I was my spaz-o-rific self. Only more so, I'm afraid, because the place I go in order to write Torii doesn't exactly get folded completely away when I'm not writing it, if you know what I mean. So I was super weird and awkward. The only good thing is that I was completely resigned and therefore, sort of cheerfully weird.

I think everyone had a good time; I know the guys did. There were two wives, one I knew from Kentucky and one I had never met before. Naturally, the Kentucky wife and I were more comfortable with each other, which sort of left the other wife out. I noticed this happening and then earnestly tried to include the wife in our conversation, knowing exactly how that feels, having been in her position many times before. I don't know how well I managed it.

I got to hold two babies, one two months and the other five months, which caused me no pain at all and a great deal of pleasure. I seem to be in a completely different place concerning children. It still stings when it occurs to me that we are not conceiving; like, what is wrong with us, exactly? Why not us? It's sort of a passing pain. And sometimes I remember what it was we thought our life would be like, and I feel a certain kind of grief.

Most of the time, however, I'm content. The life I'm living now would be absolutely impossible with a child. There would be no quiet, no time to oneself, no more clean house. There would be no writing. I'm content to be doing this with my life right now.

Later on, we'll adopt. It doesn't matter how old we'll be when we adopt: aging eggs have nothing to do with that. Though, I'm supposed to be signing myself into the doctor's program here so that we can get back into the whole infertility thing.

Anyway, so on Saturday night we had just collapsed onto the bed when Keith got a call from the MPs. A friend of his had been drinking and then had gotten into a major fight. The MPs said either Keith could come pick him up and take him to our house to sober up, or he'd have to spend the night in a barracks room.

So, there we were, out on a little evening jaunt. Before we got there, his wife called and said they'd moved him to the MP office, though we could still pick him up. The problem was, we had no idea where that was.

We asked the gate guard and got almost there, then got turned around and headed all the way back, past that gate and to a dinky little gate in the middle of nowhere. There are no such gates in Ft. Carson, or Ft. Knox that I remember, but Ft. Benning is just full of them.

Make the wrong turn, and they can be staring you down before you know it. They lead nowhere. They are not manned. They have those spike strips laid down, so you can go out, but then never return. You are just ejected, as it were, from paradise, and made to find your own way home.

I said, "The hell with this." and pulled off the road and two MP cars drove on past me. Boy, was that ever eerie. I knew cars were behind me, but I had no idea they were police cars. Thank goodness I didn't know, my anxiety was already high enough as it was.

We turned around and asked at a minimart and headed off again into the night and came to the older part of post. That's the part that looks like the show "Army Wives." It's full of old white stuccoed houses and plaques and the speed limit is 15 miles per hour for miles. And you'd better keep to it, because you don't want some fullbird colonel's wizened wife on the phone to the MPs complaining about the rabble that's speeding down the road at an unthinkable thirty miles per hour, threatening children, toy dogs and patriotic parades.

Anyway. So we crawled along. We were just completely lost, just turning at random along this maze of tiny roads with massive speed bumps, past houses that all looked the same because... wait... they are exactly the same. The same houses, the same parks, the same ghostly trees, trimmed bushes, the same plaques. Over and over and over again, round and round we go.

Finally Keith called the MP back. The MP said it was too late anyway, his boss had come along and made plans for the guy, plans which did not include him getting off the hook. Ironically, mere moments later, Keith exclaimed "I know where we are!" and that is how we found our way home.

Then yesterday, in the pool, Keith said, "Hun, I'm sorry I get so angry at you when you're driving."

And I was all, "That's ok; I know it's because you're stressed out by the circumstances. It's not really about my driving."

A pause, while several expressions passed over his face. "Right...." he said at last. "That's exactly the way it is. It's the circumstances. But I'm telling you, if you were my soldier..." another long pause, "....God help you," he finished solemnly.