Birthdays make me think

     For me, my brithday always brings me to memory lane for a nice stroll. I walk through the first family vacation that I remember when my parent's took us to Georgia, the times that all three of us girls and mom would bake cakes for dad's return from a work school, and summers of playing "little house on the praire".
     A turn comes up and I head into the teen bend...where we get to look at the weeks spent at drama camp, church camp, and vacation bible school in Georgia. The years when I had my summer booked to the point of only weekends at home...not that I didn't love my family... Those stops are longer layovers due to the sheer number of kids that memories come from. The memories of kids bring up summers of Camp Penuel (an inner city camp that I worked at) and semesters of Jeffco with my best friend and sister planning our schedules so that we had at least one break with each other! As we end the turn, I get to relive some moments from my few months spent in Costa Rica...and everything becomes Espanol! Oh, mi cielo!
     The turn straightens and another trip seems to be in order. Georgia again, but as a permenant residence for continued college...but then a bump....and a recruiter! The army stop is one of those memories that requires verification through pictures because it still doesn't all seem really. We go through all these bumpy times; basic training, advanced individual training, and then my stationing at Ft Polk. I can see the first time I put on my ACU uniform scrabbling to figure out where all the patches. A time which made me feel like a little girl playing in daddy's clothes and big boots! That feeling fades as the next picture enters. It finds me saluting the red, white and blue for the first time replacing the feeling of uncertainty with a pride that swells until you think you will burst. The bugle call changes then to tap and the feelings become slightly different...the pride is still there, but it is now accompanied by a sense of sadness with peace from God thrown in as if to say, "It's ok. Go ahead and rest. I got the watch now." Training and everyday life flies by without being able to make much of the memories, but then it slows to review the pre-deployment to Iraq...the travelling time...the first time I loaded "real" ammo into my mag and locked and loaded...the first time I heard the whistle of a rocket...the last time I heard from a friend...the look into the third world county...the sand, dust, heat, sun...the phone calls home...the tears of homesickness, fear, and fatigue. Like a flash, we are back to Ft Polk.
     Welcome home. The past year has flown by as well, with many memories of frustration and pain. Work a constant each day...including the weekends and vacation!  Anticipation for the future has become a theme that courses through me as a motivation to make it...back into the present...until next year when I can fill in the blanks of the new stops that this anticipation has added to the walk down memory lane.