MilSpouse Life
Every military spouse I know has one. It’s some sort of marked box or storage bin; usually shoved in the back corner of a closet. Sometimes the lid closes nicely. Sometimes it’s crammed so full that we have to stack other boxes on top to keep it closed.
This box is filled with curtains.
And it is more than just something that takes up storage space. Inside, each panel is folded neatly. And each panel tells a little piece of our story.
When our lives are broken into 3-5 year segments (sometimes more, sometimes less), the curtains remind us of the zip codes where those segments took place. They don’t look like mere material to us.
We look at them and see floor plans and accent walls. They remind us of the dining room where our second-born learned to smear broccoli into his eyebrows and the first girl-nursery we repainted twice because we couldn’t get the color quite right.
Sometimes, if we dig to the bottom of the box, we find ones we forgot were there.
Occasionally, we get lucky and find a window in the new house that fits the curtains that hung in the living room two addresses ago. Other times, we stuff the old curtains back into the bin and shop for the new ones because they don’t fit quite right and we just need something a little different.
When we find the perfect pair, we display them proudly on the rods. And there they’ll hang like soft, blank notebook pages inviting us to begin scribbling the next chapter of our story.
Each panel hides the secrets of lives lived within the walls of many different houses–big houses, little houses, new houses, and badly-in-need-of-repair government houses.
They witnessed the delirium of promotion days and the utter chaos of packing days. They’ve been with us through the long, lonely “settling in” days when anxiety is high and friends are something we haven’t quite gotten around to making just yet.
Our curtains have watched us learn, grow, meet new people, and stretch our comfort zones to the absolute max.
These silent observers hang around as we embrace new normals, acclimate to new environments, and slowly, painfully begin to detach ourselves from the places we’ve called home and people we dared to consider family.
Woven into their fabric is nothing less than a lifetime of our memories.
Each panel brings back memories of belly laughs and first steps, birthday parties, epic tantrums, screaming matches, and tender making-up moments. Sometimes we open the box and stare at the panels as a way to just remember.
Other times we open the box because we have new, neatly folded memories to add.
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.
This article was originally published on My Anchored Life. A huge thank you to Nichole for graciously allowing us to share her beautiful story!
Want more on military life?
- What Every Military Family Wishes You Knew About Homecoming
- To the Military Spouse Who Is Tired
- How Military Spouses Can Overcome Anxiety During High Stress
- 47 Things No One Tells You About Being a Military Wife
Thank you for sharing my post, Lauren! It was a blessing and a privilege to share my words with your readers!
Thank you for letting me share this story! I love it so much and I know other spouses will too!
So beautiful! I’m not a military wife but my sister was. Ironically, she is a very accomplished seamstress by hobby and has sewed many a curtain in her day. I will be sharing this with her. I know she will be able to relate.
Thank you for sharing, Andrea!
I absolutely loved this story and would like to add my own bit to this topic. I got my box of curtains from my mother, also an Army wife. It was full of WWII Pricillia panels that could be used as singles or put together to fill a whole wall. They fit every set of quarters we ever lived in and with the addition of straight nylon panels the battle was over. The curtain box followed us into retirement after 30 years and their final contribution was to be used to make Angel costumes for six Grands to be in the Christmas Parade in our hometown as “Gramma’s Angels”. One of those was used this last Christmas for the youngest Grand to enter the darkened dining room after dinner encased in tiny white lights and singing Angels We Have Heart On High” in her angelic God given beautiful voice. All because my mother, a wonderful frugal Army wife passed that box of curtains on to me to help me get started. What a wonderful gift it was!
It struck me how closely this resembled my life. I am the wife of a Methodist Pastor and we can be appointed to different churches frequently. Life is constantly changing and relationships too.
I was JUST talking to someone about this yesterday! Before we PCS’d this last time, I bought an extra set of curtains, because we NEVER have enough. I now have 2 sets packed away, because we have fewer windows. Figures, right? 🙂
I have never heard anyone else talk about their box of curtains this way. I have mine and it includes everything from the curtains that covered every window in the first home we owned where our youngest was born and we could paint the walls whatever color we chose, to the cheap sheers used to cover a small-ish living room window and the pinks and purples for our girls rooms in one of our many rental homes along the PCS journey, to the same shade of curtains for the master bedroom, both in short and long versions because no two homes can ever have the same size windows, right? We carry so many things from home to home, just in case it fits in the next house. When anyone comments on our storage boxes, my go-to example to explain them all is always the curtain box. Thank you for sharing this in a much more eloquent way than I ever have.
This is one of those military wife truths that we all know, but nobody talks about – until now. And what a great job you did telling our story. I learned early on to buy valances because they easily fit windows of different sizes. We’ve been retired from Army life for 25 years and in “the house I got to keep” my master bathroom curtains hanging over my long-awaited garden tub are the valances that started out hanging in the living/dining combo room in our quarters at Ft. Lewis. The lace valances I bought when we were stationed in Germany now hang in the blue kitchen I always wanted. I heard my daughter-in-law telling her friend that everything in this house has a story to go with it. I love that. Anybody can have a house that looks just like the Pottery Barn catalog. My house looks like my life.
Loved this story I’m the grandma and would come for a visit and create the curtains or revamp them from the last home. I visited their first home in retirement in March of this year and shortened the drapes from the DC house for their main bedroom for their first home in retirement. LOL
I’ve never purchased curtains in my life. T_T I feel like I’m missing out on something here….