Packing Out

I’m packing today. Packing up things from the house that has been my home for ten years. We’ve been lucky as a military family: this house has been the one we’ve come back to after schools, after deployments, after everything.

I never expected to put down roots in the army. I never expected that when I got off the plane here in April of 1999, a young sergeant fresh from her first duty assignment in Germany that Fort Hood would become my home.

We’ve left, for sure, but we’ve always came back here. I never realized how many memories were in a home. Today I found the cremation certificate of our old dog Robbie. He died five years ago but it feels like it just happened. And this front door is the place where we found a little grey kitten who walked into the house like she owned it and immediately made friends with my then one year old daughter.

This is the house I renovated on each of my husband’s deployments. The house where my daughters were born, where they grew up. This is the street where I know my neighbors and have known them for ten years. I’ve watched their children grow up to be old enough to watch my children.

This has been our home for the last decade and I am sadder than I thought I’d be about leaving it. After all, I’ve always had it to come back to. There wasn’t some new place after a deployment, there was coming home. There was no new place after commissioning. There was coming home.

I’m putting a lot of our lives in boxes today, packing up photo albums and baby books and ten years worth of tax records. And some of these things I am sure will not be unpacked for a while, until we find the next place we will hang our hats and make our home.

I know military families do this all the time so my case is nothing new or different or special. But this time, I’m leaving and I’m not coming back. I’ll find a new house with my family and we will make it our home.

But for today, I’m going to let myself be a little sad that I’m leaving the place that has been my home.