Salute to Spouses Blog

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Retirement Chronicles: Unpacking, forever

Like most military families we’ve moved, a lot. Eight times in 15 years.

It is fair to say during many of those moves about a third of our boxes were never even opened. They simply sat in the garage, stacked, stored, dusty. Until they were shipped cross-country and placed in a new corner, in a different garage where they were stacked, stored and dusty until the process started all over again.

But this time is our last time. This time, we opened the boxes. It was like Christmas.

Things we forgot we even owned came spilling out. And for the first time in 15 years they were put away. Not in a corner. Not stuffed into a storage closet. They were put away, in a place where they belonged. In a place where they would stay. Forever.

Ok, maybe using the term forever is a bit of a stretch. But for the first time in my adult life I actually, completely unpacked.

Normally, we storm through those piles of boxes in less than a week, stuffing what we know we’ll use into bedroom closets, stashing what we know we will probably never touch into the nether reaches of the garage and then labeling those boxes of unknowns to hover in moving purgatory – out where they can be found in a pinch but still in a deep enough stack of boxes that we will seriously consider whether we really have to have it.

This time, we’ve been opening boxes for four months, at a pace of two boxes a day. The boxes are broken down and carted off. The paper inside no longer has to be folded nicely and saved for the next move. It’s all gone.

And the items inside, we actually dust them off, proudly look them over and find a place for them in our home where they belong, not just where they fit. When we stand back and look around our house it is not just where we live, but it is us.

Our garage has space for a car. An actual car is in my garage, not boxes.

And for the first time ever I feel like we live somewhere and are not simply stationed there. When people ask where I’m from, I don’t have to explain the long list of where I’ve lived. We finally belong to a place and it belongs to us.

Forever.

Yeah, it’s not a stretch. For the first time, we are somewhere forever, and I like it.

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