But — hardest of all — are the times we open the box to purge. Every good military spouse knows that making room for the new memories means you have to first do the very hard work of letting go of the old ones. Even though most of us are very good at keeping only the essentials, sometimes we struggle with the “letting go” of those panels of fabric because we are afraid that, without them, we may just forget a chapter of our story.
But, the truth is that we unintentionally saved a backup file of the story on our hearts. The images may not be as crystal clear as the day we made the memories. But, like our box of curtains, we carry the memories around — from address to address, house to house, ZIP code to ZIP code–and our lives are so much richer because of them.
Even if we were oblivious to it at the time, these houses and these people that have been part of our journey have written the chapters of our story with us and for us on our very hearts. The houses where the curtains hung made us feel at home even when the person we love the most was missing at the Christmas dinner table. The friends we met along the way invited us into their lives and hearts and we celebrated, loved, and took care of each other and all our crazy children as though we had similar strands of DNA. The homes, the friends, and the memories are what have made this journey worthwhile and we never, ever have to purge them from our storage closets. It turns out the curtains we collected along the way were just a bonus.
