Three folks answered the call yesterday to support 3rd BN 3rd Marines. I really appreciate your commitment to these Marines. Paypal hangs onto the funds for a few days before they are released into my account so I'll contact those who's generosity was so gratefully recieved and let you know the details. I wasn't sure about mentioning you here without permission. I'll post more about where they are and what they might like tomorrow. Sarah, thanks for offering to help dub TV. Yes, I don't think they mind commercials, at least my Marines didn't last deployment. Anything that smacks of home... (Picture:LCpl Samuel Mincey, one of my former adoptees from Kilo Co, 3rd BN 3rd Marines, on patrol in Karmah Iraq 2007)

Speaking of home, I drove through the town I lived in while in high school last night. Having attended 18 schools growing up. Yes. 1-8. No typo-- this town was special in that the last 3.5 years of growing up, we stayed in one place. It became the first place I would call home with a straight face.

Alone for the daytrip, I also found myself driving past the house we lived in to see that time had carried it away and replaced it with a new one. As I slowly rolled through the neighborhood instigating at least one or two neighborhood watch entries I am sure, I also found my spot. Every angst ridden, painfully intense teenager has such a place. (whom am I kidding I still have these spots...remenber the picture in my old header?)

My thinking spot,

if you will,

unlike my home,

looked exactly the same.

Had I had the time

I would have climbed up

on my perch

out over the water

to draw a few breaths,

but there was no time to be had.

It was here I

planned the demise of siblings,

went to cry unabashedly,

laugh hysterically,

plot vengefully,

and be dumped by a very short-sighted Senior,

It's where I shredded my first university acceptance letter, and found Sanctuary after I came home from school to find very angry parents asking why said university had called to offer an applicant they rejected a last minute scholarship. So. completely.busted.

It's where I often

journaled,

read

and sometimes just disappeared for an afternoon away from adolescent trials and tribulations to count the ripples stones made as I dropped them into the water.

I even remember sometimes wondering what it would be like when I came back one day all grown up to see, if my tree was still there. Moving so often, I often made promises to the child I was in each place to come back and claim a particular space; to acknowledge my history and somehow give it a credibility hard won with so few roots ever setting deep into any particular soil.

Getting out of my SUV and walking down the creekbed was like opening an old box full of letters and keepsakes kept on a shelf for twenty odd years. Memories rustled in the feel of the grass under my feet, the smell of the creek, in the echos of calls to supper brought to life in the muffled sounds of children playing in a nearby yard. It was even in the feel of the air about to bring rain like all Mays then seemed to do growing up along Oyster Creek .

Clear thoughts escaped me.

Clarity came from senses gifting me with a subtle, fleeting poignancy.

Taking a coastal road back, all the same senses were useless save sight later that evening. The night wrapped around my car in an inky fog shrouding and pulling back with it the evening's reverie as I drove towards home.