Looking for Blossoms

It's been over a month since I last posted, thus totally destroying my streak of posting the previous month's reading in something resembling a timely matter. I thought about waiting until this month breathed its last and doing a double post with July and August, but the add-a-book-from-Amazon dealie is broken, so it hasn't been convenient for me to keep track of my books lately.  August's post will likely be a boring list with no shiny book cover thumbnails, so enjoy July's fanciness while you can.

[life is good]

I was just browsing through the several [_____ is good] pages, and I was mightily surprised to see my name under the [life is good] heading. Aww, shucks--I'm honored. Thank you very much to whomever thought my June reading wrap-up was interesting enough to feature. Seeing that made my day, which up until this point included nothing more exciting than a trip to the commissary.

Who do you tell your secrets to?

Or, if we're feeling grammatically correct, to whom do I tell my secrets? As much as I love you, dear Internet, not to you. But hey, I don't paint secrets on billboards (which are not nearly so easily searchable as content on the World Wide Web), either.

Luckily, there are lots of things I am happy to share, things that aren't quite secrets, but you still probably didn't know before. For example, last night I dreamed that someone was splashing though a pond turning neon tetras into turtles with a sort of magic crayon. This was after I dreamed that one of my cousins was acting as kind of a seeing eye person and helping a blind girl to ski, but although it was winter at the top of the slope, by the bottom it had become summer in all its muggy, mosquito-ridden glory. Would you believe that waking up puzzled is not entirely unusual for me?

I'm going to blame this set of crazy dreams on the action-packed couple of days M and I have had this week, owing to a visit from our twin nine-year-old nieces. Their Summer Vacation Ultra-Energy coupled with bonus Giggle Factor is as fun as it is exhausting. I'm still trying to process all our adventures: braving the chilly beach, amassing prize tickets at the arcade, playing a lot of Wii, marveling at butterflies at the botanical garden, paper footballing at various and sundry meals, chasing the cats around trying to put paper hats on their heads, chasing M around trying to put a paper hat on his head, peering into a battleship's nooks and crannies, running amok at a science museum...

I'm flat worn out! Somebody asked me at the CAP meeting last night if I was feeling all right (a question which always makes me wonder how much of a mess I look), but he understood immediately upon hearing that we'd just had a whirlwind visit from a set of nine-year-old girls.

It was a blast, though, and I can't wait to see 'em again.

I started the month of June off right with my final Mission Observer training flight with the Civil Air Patrol. My husband and I suited up in appropriate uniforms and bundled ourselves off to the regional airport, where our stalwart Mission Pilot was waiting with another MO trainee. I was scheduled for the second hop of the afternoon, so I chilled in the flight planning room while M went up with the MP and other trainee to knock out his first Mission Scanner (backseater whose primary responsibilities in a nutshell are looking out the window and keeping a log) flight. The wait gave me a chance to look over the gouge for the GPS in the Cessna 172--old and busted in comparison to the new hotness of the G1000 in the glass 182, but certainly adequate to its task.

A little over an hour later, M poked his head in the door to let me know they were back from the first hop and I should get my stuff together. I was excited not just to go flying again, but that we were going to be flying together as something other than airline passengers for the first time. Of course, we'll be even more excited about it when he completes his MP qual and we're both sitting in the front seats, but this was a good first step. Out to the airplane we went, and after the MP gave me some coordinates to plug into the GPS, we strapped in and got going.

I felt comfortable with the 172's GPS pretty quickly; one advantage of the slightly more primitive set-up is that there are fewer functions to master. The real meat of this particular flight was using the direction finding system--the analog version, with fiddly little needles instead of my nice, darn near idiot-proof Becker with its clear, simple digital read-out. Finding an ELT (practice beacon, in this case) signal with those blasted needles is indeed, as the squadron's saltier fellows warned me, more of an art than a science. I got comfortable enough making the requisite near-constant minute sensitivity adjustments and figuring out approximately where the signal might be coming from, but I am by no means a DFing artist yet. That will come with practice, but I'm not afraid to admit that given my druthers, I would much prefer to be in the right seat of the 182 if a real mission popped up.

Our training objectives met, we headed home and arrived to find that the fuel trucks had just quit for the evening. That turned out not to be such a bad thing, since it meant I got to see what it was like to fuel the aircraft ourselves instead of just radioing the truck out to do it for us. It's not too different from filling up a car, if you had to attach a grounding wire to your car, climb a ladder to get the nozzle up to the tanks, and measure your fuel consumption in gallons per hour rather than miles per gallon. By the time we taxied back to the tie-down spot to secure the aircraft, I felt thoroughly educated.

Our MP was satisfied enough with our performance to sign off on our training paperwork: pending approval up the chain, M was a qualified Mission Scanner and I was a qualified Mission Observer. Woohoo! At our squadron's weekly meeting the following Thursday, the skipper called me up front and center to present me with my first set of CAP Mission Observer wings.

Mission Observer Wings

Who do you write down as your Emergency Contact? Why did you pick this person?

Like most married folks, I list my spouse as my primary emergency contact. Unlike most married folks, our situation is not simple enough to say, "That's that!" and move on with the rest of whatever form I'm filling out. With my husband on active duty in the Navy, we're heading into a part of his career where he will be as likely to be thousands of miles away and largely out of touch if something happens to me as he will to be on base just down the road. Even when he isn't actually out on det (deployed, but the C-2A community runs detachment style rather than the whole squadron deploying at once), there will still be plenty of times when he'll be inaccessible. It's just not feasible for my husband to be the only soul on my emergency contact list.

It's strange to think about contingencies in place should anything happen to me; I'm much more used to nailing out the details of how I would be contacted if M were hurt or... I can't type the other one. (Hey, I'm not that inured to thinking about these horrifying possibilities.) Some fellow military spouse friends of mine were confronted with having to fill out all that "Primary Next of Kin" information just before their husbands deployed. That's just what you think about in excruciating detail during the last little bit of time you have to enjoy with your spouse before he goes away for months: how you want to receive the worst possible news of your entire life! Yay!--let's dwell on such cheery subjects as which friends you want called for your support when a somber-looking officer in uniform shows up on your doorstep, or which flavor of chaplain will provide for your religious needs in your time of soul-crushing grief, or how you would notify other family members. Fun stuff, right? Who wants to think about that?

Here's the thing: we do think about it. Sometimes we think about it a lot.

It might seem strange to those outside the military community that we work through every detail of an event as terrifying as receiving news that one's spouse has been killed. It's not exactly something that comes up in normal conversation, especially when the popular image of a military spouse is that of someone who is tough and brave and a pillar of strength and sacrifice for the servicemember and the family back home. Nobody wants her friends and family to think that they are morbid, weak, or--most repugnant of all--that by mentally exploring these scenarios, they are subconsciously willing it to happen. No wonder most people don't talk about it.

But what a relief when someone finally does say something! I have been reading the blog to which I linked above, called SpouseBUZZ, for a few years, and its contributors have made gigantic strides in bringing "anticipatory grief" out of the shadows and showing military spouses that they are not alone in their fears or what they may have thought was a shameful preoccupation with the most painful "what-ifs." Nothing is ever as scary or hard to deal with when you know that other people are dealing with the same thing, and the wealth of posts and comments under the Anticipatory Grief category provides evidence in writing that military spouses are coping with this hitherto lonely and silent pain together, and without being ashamed. For me, and for a lot of other military spouses out there, there's comfort in that knowledge.

Of course, it's easier for me to think calmly and rationally about this difficult subject with my husband home and cooking me dinner fifteen feet away from my seat on the couch. My thoughts are with those currently facing these fears while counting down the months and days until their loved ones are back in their arms.