Being associated with the military and having to move around so often, “home” has many different concepts. Home can mean where you grew up, where your last duty station is, or your house at your current duty station. The meaning of “home” can change context from person to person, or from conversation to conversation depending on the person.
For Christmas I was afforded the opportunity to go “home” to Wisconsin, which is where I grew up and where my parents and brother live. Although I have not lived in Wisconsin for over ten years, in my heart Wisconsin will always be where “home” is for me. I may not live there again anytime soon, but my husband and I would like to retire there when his military enlistment is up.
When we returned from our trip “home”, I was truly disgusted by the appearance of my physical home, Warner Barracks. There was garbage all over post, beer bottles in the high school lawn, and around my building there were hundreds of cigarette butts, peanut oil dumped on the grass from frying turkeys over the holidays, an assortment of destroyed lawn toys, a shopping cart, and other forms of debris. I had a hard enough time leaving Wisconsin, and coming back home with the common areas in this condition made it almost unbearable for me to be here.
You see, to many people living here in Germany is only a temporary thing. Truth be told, it really is a temporary assignment. If you are married you will be here for a minimum of three years unless you choose to extend. Even if you do choose to extend, eventually you will have to move back to the states unless you choose to retire in Germany and even then you will have to move off post. Since many view living here as temporary, they do not view this assignment as their home and do not treat it as such. They do not pick up after themselves, leave the common areas in disarray, and do not extend kindness or courtesy to their neighbors. I do believe in the old saying that “home is where your heart is”, but for the time being this is where we are living. God put us here and for the duration of our stay here this is our home and it should be treated as such. It is no t difficult to pick up after ourselves, our children, our pets. If for some reason one of our neighbors forgets to throw something away, it is not difficult to help them out that one time. It is not difficult to be kind to our neighbors or even make friends with them, no matter where they are from or their race/culture/ethnicity. If we all work together and extend just a little bit of common courtesy to one another then this place can truly become a home.
Even though to me “home” will always be Wisconsin and that is where my heart is, in reality home is where I hang my hat. Right now, my hat hangs in Bamberg, Germany. I will pick up after myself and my family, I will do my part to ensure that the common areas are clean (without having to bear the brunt of the weight and be a maid to my neighbors). I will extend kindness and courtesy to my neighbors because I want my home to become a place that I want to be, not just some place I am passing through on the road of life on my way to somewhere else.
If only my neighbors will adopt the same train of thought.
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