Leave a Light On

It took me over a year to realize that Ahoy Acres was shaped like a ship. Ahoy Drive is the bowsprit leading into a small '60s era development of unrelieved, single-story brick ranchers and faux salt-boxes with fake clapboards. After a block, to your left, Port Road cradles the south side of this crumbling little haven of the lower-middle-class American dream. Yes, Starboard Road is on the right. We lived on Port, just before the waterline's curve. It was the best we could afford.

My husband had just left for six month deployment. He's in the Navy--you'd think Ahoy Acres would take me less than a year. I'm a little slow. We'd never done such a long deployment before. I knew the agony of being parted for months at a time. He had already been gone 45 days that year, and six months seemed an eternity.

To keep myself busy, I began a quilt. I've sewn most of my life, always creatively, but seldom well. I'd never quilted anything before, but I needed something to make the days run together--anything to make six months shorter than it was. I chose a simple log cabin design, in autumn browns with a dark red square in the center. That square, I'd learned, was the home fire burning.

As the squares grew beneath my fingers, my 2 year old daughter moved from my bed into her own. She weaned. She got bit by the cat and needed antibiotics. The stove died and had to be replaced. I learned everything one could learn about decorating and furniture refinishing from The Discovery Channel. I decided the quilt was too small--a queen--it needed to be a king.

I tried laying the pieces out every which way. No dice. I tried buying more fabric. Not in any store near me. Then, as if I was a cartoon character, a light bulb illuminated my room one late night I smoothed my tousled bed-clothes, too empty and forlorn, and began to lay out the quilt squares in the shape of a ship.

With complementary sashing, it would work. I was only one piece short. I gathered the scraps together. Yes, there was enough and dug into three generations of fabric stash, my grandmother's, my mother's and mine and found a clear yellow cotton. I ran up that square and placed it just before the waterline's curve. The red squares spread across the bed, dim and inviting--all the other wives awaiting all the other men on my husband's ship. But at the corner, exactly where our house stood in Ahoy Acres, there was a light in the Log Cabin's window.

I never finished the quilt, but it served its purpose. It's somewhere in one of my fabric bins waiting for desperate hands to lay upon it again. Though we no longer live in Ahoy Acres, that was three houses ago, my quilt won't have long to wait.

At the beginning of this year, my husband's ship deployed for parts unknown, for an undetermined time, and an unpredictable return. It could be 40 days. It could be 9 months. My second child, now a two year old might be weaned by then. She might sleep in her own bed, too. As he prepared for war, I feel like I need to make preparations of my own. I've prepared my mind for the idea that he might never return--and I studiously ignore it, employing every tool at my disposal to make the days run together. Even a quilt.

Somewhere out there, on the dark waters, three hundred men know that somewhere, in developments shaped like ships and not, the home fires are burning. But my husband knows there is a light in the window.

Come home safely, beloved.

Come home.

Note: This was written in 2003, as the Iraq War loomed. My husband's ship was one of many that fired the opening salvos of that war. Each day during that 5 month deployment--by the grace of God a short one compared to what some endured--my husband boarded ships daily, carrying a gun, perhaps facing only scared merchant sailors, perhaps facing terrorists who would shoot first and answer questions later. For three days, while CNN reported nothing, my email returned undelivered, bounced. For three days, I knew--WE kNEW, we military wives--that the shooting had already begun. We were at war... but no one heard us and no one dried our tears.

My husband returned, well and healthy, alive to deploy again another day. This August he will have "15 years in." A bit more than five years from now, he will retire from the Navy... on my birthday.