Well, its garage-sale season around here.
Which normally brings a little bit of joy to my Type-A heart because I get to sticker and label and color-code things.
I get rid of several bins of crap crowding my garage. I get to sort through too-small baby clothes, toys, and books we no longer need. I get to bring out my big jar of spare change and haggle with my neighbors over a dime.
It’s great times.
Except, in a military town, garage sales have an underlying meaning.
There is more stuff for sale, for starters. More clothes, more furniture, more appliances. More baggage.
This year’s garage sale, I’m throwing with three other friends. Two of whom are months away from PCS-ing.
Which, honestly, I still forget, as we go on our daily jogs or take our kids to the library’s story hour.
So when we were discussing whether we wanted to hang up clothes or lay them out on a tarp at this weekend’s sale, I was a bit startled when one soon-to-move friend looked at us, panicked.
“I still haven’t had the courage to dig through our closets. And I need to. I need to get rid of this stuff. We don’t need it all. And there’s no point making the Navy move it, then,” she said.
No amount of color-coded stickers could cheer us up after that.
I am a firm member of Camp Denial when I lose a fellow member of my “mama tribe,” i.e., my fellow military-wife friends who get it and have my back, too.
I prefer not to think about the fact that my kids won’t always run into their homes, familiar with them and their children. That we won’t always know what the coded language means when we are excited our husbands are about to come home. That we won’t always be there to drop soup on a sick friend’s doorstep or watch children during a rather tedious FRG meeting.
When I was a newlywed, sending my husband off to boot camp, I thought I knew all about the goodbyes.
How hard it would be to say goodbye to him. To miss him. To feel the empty hole he left.
I didn’t think about the other good-byes. To the friends. To the co-workers. To the barista at the local Starbucks who knows I want a decaf cafe latte with soy before I even pull up to the window on my morning drive to my daughter’s pre-school.
Those goodbyes evaded me as we set off on our military adventure.
And now, here I sit, a regular old pro at saying goodbye to my husband over and over and over again, but still struggling with the less-frequent but often more gut-wrenching farewells I have to say to our friends.
It makes these next few months all the more bittersweet. The last coffee dates. The last beach trips. The last time we wait for a husband to return.
The last garage sale.
Where I have to watch my friends sell off the unnecessary furniture, too-small baby clothes, and extra colanders and kitchen gear they no longer want to take to their new Navy home.
Sending my husband off to boot camp taught me a lot.
But it didn’t teach me how to survive the last garage sale.
