When one adventure story ends, another story begins…
As I sit down to write today, I can’t believe that 3 weeks have passed since we celebrated D’s Marine Corps career. After 23 years of moving every few years and putting down shallow roots wherever we were stationed, we will now be putting down permanent roots on our homestead. Life will be changing in so many ways that we still haven’t truly come to understand the significance of the end of this military adventure.
Over the years, we’ve lived all over the United States, met some really cool people, and experienced a variety of amazing adventures which would never have happened if it weren’t for our lives as a military family. As I try to wrap my head around it all, I am thankful for each stage of D’s career even if they weren’t all easy. New duty stations, leaving friends, deployments… not easy. Yet with each new chapter came new adventures that were fun and helped us grow together as a family.
We went into military life together. We were young and, in many ways, naive about what the future held for us. We’re walking away older, wiser, and with a variety of rich life experiences. D was strong and healthy when he joined. He’s walking away broken and unable to do many of the things he could before, yet he doesn’t regret his service. His deployments were hard on him and changed him in many ways, but he’s still thankful for those experiences.
D didn’t want a formal retirement ceremony. Instead, he decided to do a more relaxed celebration in Joshua Tree National Park. Anyone who knows him saw how fitting this location was for the celebrating his Marine Corps career. We spent a lot of time in the park and being outdoors, in a less formal setting, is totally him. He did have a little more formal award ceremony earlier in the day.
We’re all still trying to wrap our heads around the fact that there won’t be any more new duty stations, no more moving every few years. It’s all still too new.
We’re closing the pages on the second book in our lives: Marine Corps Adventures. As we set aside that adventure, we open a new book filled with blank pages waiting for new adventures to be experienced and written.
God bless you in the new stage of your lives!
Mrs. White recently posted..The House Comes First
Congratulations! The transition out of the military is so hard but I wish you the best. We were also stationed in 29 and loved it there so much. Good luck!