The summer has been a little chaotic--it's hard to settle down and write, much less think about what I want to write when you are trying to keep an eye on the doings of this many people (children, husband, mother-in-law, brother-in-law, and various friends). This was always one of the things about me that Thomas had a hard time understanding, although he seemed content to let me get on with it while he hid himself away either reading or, that last summer, watching endless episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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More about St. Michael and oddly, it ties into the question of Thomas's effects and the things that were returned to us from Iraq. A few days before he was killed, I sent Thomas a St. Michael medal, just taped it to the inside of a notecard. It wasn't blessed by anyone but me, but I wanted him to have it. When we received Thomas's things, the notecard was in there but the medal was gone, the little piece of masking tape that had been holding it to the card just flapping forlornly. I don't know whether he ever got it or if it disappeared along the way or if he had it with him and somewhere out there a medal of St. Michael the Archangel is floating around the streets of Mosul. So when I encounter images of St. Michael in this context, they mean much more to me than they used to.

The rest of Thomas's things were pretty skimpy. There were some paperback books, his boots, some camouflage, in fact very little that I can remember. It all smelled of insecticide, having been processed through the facility at Aberdeen, Maryland. They shipped the box FedEx. It was just a little weird. By now it was nearly Christmas, or maybe it was in the first few days after Christmas, so we asked Christina, his not-quite-girlfriend, to come and pick out something of his. She came and I think took a jacket, and had dinner with us--I think a table full of stricken people just about sums it up.