Storage

We are finally executing Operation Free the Bus this weekend. The "Bus" is my husband's beloved 1976 Westfalia VW, which, despite our numerous failed attempts to free it, has remained in storage for nearly a decade. In the beginning, the Westy was holding court in my mother in law's garage, where is was meant to stay temporarily. My husband put the bus into storage in anticipation of a military move overseas, but that move never materialized. As it is with life in the Navy, many other relocations happened instead and somewhere along the way it became impossible to get the bus to where we were stationed in Washington. 2009 marked the beginning of a series of awful losses for our family and throughout the struggles that ensued, the bus and our dreams had to be set aside. Eventually, after the detrimental loss of my mother in law, we had to sell her house and transfer the bus to permanent storage.

It's been a sad road for us and in many ways the journey of the Westy follows along with our journey as well.  The whole thing has got me feeling very sentimental and it only got worse today as I stumbled through old emails trying to find our storage agreement for the Westy. Instead I found old letters between my husband and I during all our past deployments. In the beginning our letters were all so fresh and full of dreams for the future, a bit like the bus when it went into "temporary" storage. As we faced the challenges of deployments, losing a significant portion of my husband's family, and a lawsuit involving family, our email content changed from hopeful and fun to bills and responsibilities. It was as though our old selves were locked away in permanent storage along with the bus.

Now we find ourselves on shore duty in the same state as our beloved Westfalia and I wonder what the correspondence marking this time would look like. The family matters have all been settled and although we have come out on the other side of all our tragedies, we are now different people because of everything we've endured. I can see it in our old emails and I can see it in our faces, we have aged significantly in the past few years. So, when we pull open the door to our storage unit this weekend and sun spills over the Westy for the first time in years, I hope that sitting in the back corner of our tattered and neglected bus, we'll find a little bit of our old selves also waiting to be freed from storage.