When the Smoke Clears

Wow. This site went down for a few hours. Turns out it was time to renew my domain name. Four years. And today is all about fours.

The one that hits hardest hit today.

Forty.

My kind mother brought me into this world forty years ago. Oh, sure it should have been forty years ago yesterday, but I was stubborn. She remembers the time because she was able to watch All My Children twice during labor. She said they bundled me up and laid me down next to her and I just screamed into her face. She screamed back into mine. Thus set the tone of our relationship.

So today, I have to thank her. She gave me the strength to become what I am willing to work for, and to keep trying for something different, always establishing my own measures of success to live up to, not the usual lifestyle-expenditure gauges.

And at 40, where am I? Hidden away in a part of the world I always wondered about living an adventure normally experienced by those half my age. (Not gonna lie… it really helps when I get looks of incredulity once people find out my age, thinking that I am much younger.)

And she? Back at her home trying to estimate how to balance the quality and beauty she wants every day of her life with the treatments she needs to undergo to get to the next event. Support from friends helps. I wish I could be there, though. But we talk.

I am meeting amazing individuals, some good, some very evil. Sorry, there is no other word for these men. I am in a forgotten place I shall soon describe in some detail, though not too much. And many of these people are just beautiful, and by beautiful I mean what radiates from them. There are those who give off such a feeling of goodness combined with strength. One thing I can say for certain: These people love their children, and any society that places that high a value on those priorities deserves our respect. And help.

It’s… challenging. A lot of the comforts that many troops do have at many locations, we are lacking. But we have electricity and we can flush. We even have internet. And the complete lack of any sort of a PX or Bazaar to which we can go means we are all saving massive amounts of money. It’s a fairly communist existence here, which is odd considering where we are from. We just know it would never work back home, nor would it work in a larger unit. (And it also means that the loss of my camera is a really rough hit… my FAVE camera… while on a mission… since I can’t just run down to the store and get another and it can take a month or more to get mail.)

But we are a small group in a forgotten area in the (until recently) forgotten war. It’s not to say there isn’t a great deal happening, it’s just that you won’t hear about it because reporters don’t come out here. Looking on most maps, there is a big blank spot in the area where we work, as if towns don’t exist. They do.

So on my desk sits scraps of paper on which I practice writing in Dari. I try deciphering things I find in notes, words on bottles and even the Coca Cola can, a taste of home, with the unfamiliar. But then again, that’s in Arabic. Similar, but not the same. This is my “normal.” For now.

And no matter what comes of all of this, it has been a fantastic life. Even in the worst years, it has been pretty danged good. So I hope to share a few more stories before it’s all gone.

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