this is our gypsy camp

Breaking [in] the House

Five houses, eight years. These domiciles are full characters in our gypsy story.

Getting familiar with them is fraught with the intimate awkwardness of a first middle school slow dance. (How much space do we have, do we give? I keep tripping! Where should I put my hands?) In Valproto I got locked inside our house when I was trying to go to work. Pregnant in Arizona, I struggled hormonally with the big tangled outdoor drying rack and called animal control for a harmless snake. On Kadena I mangled my feet on those accursed metal-rimmed stairs. In Yomitan I was trying out a second-story window at sunrise when it jerked open, sending an unsuspecting lizard to its death below (I love the smell of splatted gecko in the morning!).

At first it's fun, but soon it's just annoying: fumbling through the door locking procedure, tripping over the dishwasher door, pushing the wrong buttons on the microwave and getting freaked out by the gas oven, bonking heads on that light fixture, trying to decide where to hang each bath towel, opening the laundry closet door into the whirling ceiling fan because yeah, it's that crowded in here.

And there are the iffy surprises, the inevitable results of a beggars-can't-be-choosers location and very jetlagged house viewing: the twitch-inducing asymmetry of the master bedroom, the comically loud creakiness of the spiral stairs and wooden floor, the way both outside doors pop open if they're not deadbolted, the luscious but overgrown maple that we have to cowtow to on the way to our car, the last tenant's pyramids of pet hair in the corners, the teeny tininess of the washer & dryer.

There are good surprises too: the neighbors are nice, the sound of rain on the skylight is cozy and the tiny loads that come out of the dryer are oh-so-foldable. Space is used efficiently. The spiral staircase no longer gives me vertigo, and the tiny kitchen doesn't drive me crazy. On the back patio there's a rose bush that burst into bloom for Mother's Day, and to Eva's delight, gray catbirds, robins, and squirrels come calling often. And the neighborhood--oh, the neighborhood!--but I'll gush about that on another day.

Our shipment from Japan hasn't even arrived yet, but today we had to decide where we want to move next. It makes my head spin how fast we'll pick up and go again. And part of me says Don't mess it up, this "new" house that isn't ours! And part of me already loves the many small knicks, scratches, wears, tears, and floor-treadings that will say We were here, this spot was ours for that year.

Posted from my elitist electronic toy with an app that I paid for

The Year of Two Springs

Hi, friends.

For thoughts on Boston and everything else, go here.

For inane pictures taken with my phone, stick around--I think I can arrange something for you.

Winter lasts for about a month and a half in Okinawa, so spring was well on its way out the door by the time we flew from the island at the end of March. The bloom was off the hibiscus, you know? Only metaphorically, of course, because many of the hibiscus bushes in Oki bloom year-round. (The faithful hedges around our first house there, the on-base one, bloomed for over a year straight until an especially vicious typhoon came through and uprooted them all, shredding them for good measure.) It was starting to hint at rainy season, with a threat of hot steamy mugginess to come after. So when we landed in Virginia in time for freezing cold weather, I was perfectly happy with that. Within a few days, things were warming up, the skies were clearing, cherry blossoms were popping out from elongated peduncle--yes, that's a thing--to full bloom. And now that it's been a couple of weeks, pollen is swirling around in toxic green puffs and the dogwoods are making their debuts.

It is our year of two springs.

(As seen through my phone.) (That's two subtle disclaimers about this being mere iPhonography. Do I need a third? No? Oh, OK.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...and there was much Claritin-eating.

 

 

 

My heart is heavy with everything wrong in the world, but I'm thankful that we are loved by a God who makes dead things live again.

 

Posted from my elitist electronic toy with an app that I paid for

Hey Pater Familias:

Remember when it was just us?

Remember when laundry was a discrete event, rather than an equation that approaches infinity?

(Remember when I actually remembered my math?)

Remember when we slept in on Christmas and we opened our presents then sat around looking at each other being like "This is lame"?

Remember when raspberry wasn't a verb?

Remember when I wouldn't have been ok with finding long blonde hairs on your clothes?

Remember when we had so much time alone together that we'd run out of things to talk about?

Remember when our bathtub had no toys?

Remember when we used to judge parents and we didn't know what we were talking about?

Remember when bowls weren't hats, bathrobes weren't wings, and nobody ever jumped off of anything in our house?

Remember when kid-snot tracks didn't grace my shirt as motherhood epaulets, when spit and spit-up were not my campaign ribbons?

Remember back when there was no chance, in our house, of stumbling across some tiny shirt, some never-worn diaper, some miniscule sock or leftover pacifier, that would make me gasp from cuteness and say "Hey Pater Familias, remember when...?"

Posted from my elitist electronic toy with an app that I paid for

Beached [This is Okinawa]

I think this is decomposing whale skin on my jeans. Probably not fully grown, definitely female. I don't know this, of course; I read it in the paper the next day.

There's a dead whale on Torii Beach. She's all over Facebook, lying there under the heavily clouded sky, a quiet island of navy rising from the cacophony of turquoises and blues and greens and browns of the warm shallow water. We debate going to look--it seems low, but it seems once-in-a-lifetime, but we don't want to traumatize Eva, but she doesn't really get death yet anyway. In the end the kids fall asleep in the car and our problems are solved. We take turns joining other casualty-gazers  to stare at the 30-foot corpse.

Earlier she was stuck on the reef a ways out, but she's been washed up to the base of the little cliff by the beach's landing zone. (Because this is Okinawa, and this is Army, so of course the beach has a spot for helicopters to land.) Cars are lined up on the LZ in spacious American rows.

The baby-mom in me stops breathing for a minute when I look over the cliff and see her perfect stillness: the oversize, cross-species embodiment of an unspoken nightmare.

Humanity is out in all its glory. They're almost all Americans because this is on post. A husband and wife stride toward the site, arguing, "If you don't WANT to look at it you DON'T HAVE TO COME," her angry tone contradicting their quick cooperative march. An unsupervised girl tries for a front-row seat on the cliff and accelerates erosion in a serious way, scrambling backwards as earth collapses under her. Down on the beach a dad drags his scared, sobbing four-yr-old closer to the whale. People take smiling pictures with the carcass, throwing up the Japanese two-fingered cheese-u! sign. A couple of Okinawans pseudo-sneak onto post for a gander by walking down the beach because it's low tide.

We wear sweat pants, jeans, business casual, suits, green berets, field caps, and an off-duty gate guard wears a holstered weapon as he watches the girl ruining the cliff; he vaguely considers an intervention. We wield every flavor of recording device, from cell phone to thousand-dollar lens. We gawk.

An MP officiously stands guard on what is probably his most exciting duty of his tour here, preventing...what? We're not sure. Maybe preventing the guy with the son from making him ride the whale for a photo op.

She rests on the sharp coral sand and squishy green seaweed, stretching across the tide lines. The graceful curve of her tail droops pathetically over a half-submerged rock into a tidal pool. It's hard to tell what's what on her bulk--is that a blow hole? I can't find her eye.

"It smells like...rutabaga!" a man says.

I squat for a picture, trying to fit all of her in, and start to fall in the deep broken-coral sand but catch myself. I kneel instead and a boy next to me points out, "There's whale skin...there's a piece of whale skin...there's a piece...there's a piece." We're surrounded by bits of suntanned whale. You can see the white scrapes where they've been rubbed off by the tide dragging her over coral, long after death.

The whole thing is sad and impressive and makes me feel like a chump, and I leave. The next day scientists come and strip her down to her bones and the beach is, not for the first time, covered in blood.

 

No, we're not on island anymore, but this is going to continue 'til my drafts folder is empty! This is Okinawa is a series meant to capture observations and moments in our last days here, the sorts of things I like to think I'll never forget but know I will. Read more about Oki here and here.

Moving pictures, pt 1

Command center on moving day #1, while we desperately tried to finish things up in the kitchen.

Handmade matching dress (and moving-day Evasitting) from our dear neighbors. ::tear::

Don't worry guys, I'll just supervise things from right here. Just gotta rest my eyes for a minu...

Passed out in Kadena hotel room #1

Kadena hotel room #2, the Pet Room of Doom--all the cool parents make their kids sleep in the closet, right?

Taking off on the long flight, which the Pater Familias & Mad Max barely made. (For those of you not intimately, excruciatingly familiar with the trip--the flight from Okinawa to Tokyo is about 2.5 hours, then you have a ludicrously short layover and sprint to your 12.5 hour flight to Washington, DC.)

Not a fan of wearing the headphones, but yes a fan of Finding Nemo: "It's da same Finding Nemo as I have at MY house!"

Good morning, Virginia! Or...not.

View from our room in Alexandria. It feels so good to be home-ish.

 

Posted from my elitist electronic toy with an app that I paid for

Let's Make This Awkward [Or, So long & thanks for all the fish]

You know it may have been a crazy few weeks if you're looking forward to an over-24-hour trip with two small kids because you'll get to sit down a lot. And because when you get there, at some point you just may have a long enough chunk of time where you don't have to use the car seat so you can actually wash (and hang dry, which takes all the time) the vaguely poopy car seat cover. Yes, the same car seat cover that will be gracing us with its presence in a metal tube hurtling through the sky far above the Pacific, Alaska, Canada, and finally the East Coast of the United STATES OF AMURRICCAAAA! Moving with 2.5 weeks' notice is no joke, and I may have cracked under the pressure.

I have to keep this short, because I'm supposed to be packing and I can't get caught sitting in front of the computer when a certain someone walks in.

So I'm going to go ahead and make it awkward and say a formal goodbye to our very special group of friends here in Okinawa. You have been generous with your hearts and homes, way more generous than us, in fact. I feel like I've been kind of overwhelmed and take-take-taking from people for at least the last year, and I don't believe in karma but this is better: in our world without karma, you all live the infinity of God's grace (and mercy, when I'm late to meet you for yet another time and you're still friends with me).

Thanks for the last three years: the friendships, the dinners, the playdates, the encouragement. And lately, thanks for the last-this-and-thats, the pictures you let me take, the patience, the handshakes and side hugs and real hugs, the emails and the presents and the cards and the dinners (everything feels so undeserved) and thanks for loving us and our kids so well. 

And to everyone else: see you in Virginia! 

Relativity

Generally, I don't agree with using the "It could be worse" reasoning on other people to get their attitudes in line. Because no matter how trivial what they're 'going through' is...it's just really annoying. It can be a highly effective part of one's inner monologue, though. 

We are currently spending about a week in a hotel room with two easy-going kids and the diapered dog. I'm sporting a hung-over/post-barfight look thanks to 40 years of pet dander embedded in the walls and maybe some hidden black mold, and my attempts to keep it neat (getting in practice for the new! organized! lifestyle! that I aspire to with every move) have proven Sisyphean. And it's hard keeping the kids happy and my joints have gone all barometric and there's the slight issue of the fact that my husband may not be able to complete 2 weeks' worth of inprocessing in the 2 days that it has come down to. And worst of all, there's only one computer with internet for the two of us.

Now let's take a journey back in time.

In the summer of '91, for three months my family lived in two hotel rooms in the Hotel Panama, Panama City, Panama (had to clarify just in case you were wondering whether it was the Central American country where a drug lord's government had recently been overthrown, or the spring break spot--a distinction my grandmother's travel agent once failed to make--but I digress). Four kids, including a three-month-old--four! what were my parents thinking?! Why didn't they leave at least one of us in the States?--off base house hunting, a long commute to post over potholed roads through crimeridden stoplights (no cell phones! a cattle prod and mace in the car for protection!), oh yeah and things like when you walked into McDonald's there was a 17 year old Panamanian soldier standing there with a gun as big as himself.

I'm a wimp, and I hereby nominate my mother for the Martha Summerhayes Award of Supreme Armywifehood. (If you're wondering who that is, look at the quote at the top of this page.)

What Lurks Above [This is Okinawa]

I beep the remote at the AC/heater, the long narrow contraption that hangs from the ceiling corner of each room. I keep the corner of my eye on it to make sure it actually turns on, because it's tempermental and sometimes it doesn't. I'm holding Oz (he sits proud and upright and forwardlooking in the crick of my arm--which he couldn't do without my support--as though I'm his trusty steed, carrying his royal highness through the enchanted forests of our home). There's an odd scuttling sound and my eye corner spots something dark drop with a quiet thud, a swift path straight down out of the opening heater door into the carved-wood Croatian vase that decorates my dresser, only a couple of feet from where I'm about to put my sweet baby down to sleep.

"Nathan!" I shriek with my best girly shriekiness. It was too big to be a spider--had to be too big to be a spider, even compared to the terrors that I've twice found lurking on our bedroom crown molding. "I think it was a gecko..." I tell him unsurely. That skittering just didn't sound right. I hadn't gotten the gecko vibe. I catch geckos with my bare hands. I don't really think it was a gecko.

He takes the vase into our shower and carefully dumps its contents. A 5-inch centipede hits the tile with what can only be described as a clatter and is swiftly dispatched with a flip flop.

 

This is Okinawa is a series meant to capture observations and moments in our last days here, the sorts of things I like to think I'll never forget but know I will. (I doubt I'll get very far before my computer gets packed up.) Read more about Oki here and here.

Nap

It's naptime again, his irritated squeaks and frantically kicking legs tell me. I fight the frustration that he can't soothe himself to sleep the way Eva could at his age--no sterile, rubbery plastic in his mouth, thankyouverymuch!--and walk around with him in the front pack, doing the slightly bouncy walk just as he likes. I go for the top rack of the dishwasher, then turn away. There are so, so many things I need to be doing right now, but I decide to savor this. Pretty soon he's going to be all arms and legs and verbalized opinions instead of rolls and drool and merely vocalized opinions. 

The washing machine is filling and I scootch into the laundry room next to it. The soothing water noise begins to win and his wiggly head slowly drops toward my chest--oh, he's a fighter!--and he stares at the window, perfect rectangular catchlights in each liquidy brownish-bluish-greenish eye. Auburn lashes droop toward under-eye-wrinkle and bounce back up like they're on bungies. A dollop of curdly spit-up lingers in the corner of his perfectly pink, perfectly puckered lips, and his chubby fingers clutch desperately at my necklace. He has a wrist roll.

The washing machine stops filling with a clank and in the sudden silence he jerks awake, looking up at me with a question. It begins to spin and he's asleep again. His head relaxes back against my cradling hand, his soft feathery mullet brushing my thumb.

Subjugation [This is Okinawa]

Sometimes we say that they would concrete over the entire island if they could. Concrete highrises give way to concrete schools, concrete seawalls with concrete wave breakers, concrete houses and concrete covers on the sewers when we're lucky, concrete between the trees along the side of the road, concreted-over hills and concrete tombs lined up overlooking the sea and also lined up in alleyways behind convenience stores. Little concrete ditches, just big enough for your car's tire, lining the roads--we call them gaijin traps. Moldy, crumbling concrete.

Then there is the rusty everything, the dirt sports fields, the bits and pieces and piles of island trash--what do you do with big pieces of junk when you live in a place that burns its waste and you can't pay to have it taken? In a yard around the corner from my house sits a derelict car that is stuffed, footwell to dashboard to ceiling, with that sort of non-burnable non-perishable trash that in America just kind of disappears. From our sight, anyway.

They try to subdue the messy green growth in this place. Every spring they trim it back, the grass ninjas clad head to toeboot in gloves and sleeves and hats and nets, armed with saw-toothed metal weed whackers, in preparation for the hordes of tall(ish) fair-skinned Tokyo-styled tourists.

The island is wrought into a life-size concrete model of itself, subjugated, and it's a theme it knows well.

The Ryukyus were a kingdom once. For hundreds of years they traded internationally and raised skilled horsemen and stoneworkers and priestesses, a Pacific Asian melting pot. Then placed under a samurai, annexed by Japan, sacrified for the new mainland, suppressed, their heart's language (Uchinaaguchi) outlawed. Then chosen to host a battle as the necessary, lesser of two grand evils: invaded and overrun and bombed and burned and combed and recombed for every unsurrendering soldier that hadn't committed suicide in a cave with a grenade or in a field with a sword. And finally, given away by the country that had taken it less than a hundred years earlier. Made American for almost three decades.

Okinawa was the bloody ransom Japan paid for a measure of freedom from consequences, and it sounds melodramatic but when it comes down to it that is why I sit on this island with my newborn son, watching MV-22s fly by my grimy hospital window.

This is Okinawa is a series meant to capture observations and moments in our last days here, the sorts of things I like to think I'll never forget but know I will. (I doubt I'll get very far before my computer gets packed up.) Read more about Oki here and here.