lone star

When you occupy a piece of ground early in the day, and watch it shift from afternoon into twilight, you experience an unexpected intimacy with the landscape. When evening comes, and the lengthening shadows constrict your easy movement around roots, holes, and sylvan debris, your senses are quickened but you still feel at home in that space. Not so when thrust into a place where night has already come before you. There are other eyes that watch you comfortably, alert, having spent the day where darkness has fallen. You are the one who doesn't belong--you have not become a part of the landscape and your clumsiness in the night gives your near-panic away.

I saw so many shooting stars this week, out in the field with my Soldiers. Each night we were in a different location, but whether in the slick, humid woods or out in the open grass we could see the stars. Do stars shoot through the sky all the time, and we just can't see it because of all the light pollution around us? There may have been an extraordinary amount of meteoric activity lately, but I didn't waste a single shooting star. I wished I was home, I wished I were a better wife, I wished my mother were still alive. Wild horses checked our perimeter, and I wished I could coax one into letting me ride.

I asked my platoon sergeant, who also noticed the extraordinary stellar activity, if he ever felt overwhelmed by a feeling that he married someone so wonderful that it was hard to believe they ever fought, or did anything but stay very, very close to each other for hours on end. He said that this feeling snuck up on him often while he was away from her. He and his wife have children and are decades ahead of me in life, but I was contented to hear him say this. It does keep growing, the needing and loving and wanting not to be apart. It made me feel less childish that I was really, deeply, missing my husband while on a short training event less than an hour away. Sometimes I wonder what we will do if/when either of us deploys. How did my parents do it? I have no answers, only the vague apprehension that it is virtually uncharted territory, and the only existing maps are lopsided and contain warnings that "Beyond Here There Be Monsters." It is one thing to miss your dad for six months every year, as I did growing up. This will be another thing entirely.