Sorry, I took off wandering through our more current situation. There is still quite a bit to say about 2005, the year of consolidation, as I think of it.

*****


Richard and Matthew and I enjoyed our trip to Arizona. I kept thinking that Thomas would have loved it--he really loved the desert landscapes we had travelled through when he was younger--but then I would think, he spent the last few weeks of his life in a country that is mostly desert and he might not have felt quite so friendly toward it if he had returned. I still loved it, despite my speculations about Thomas's possibly ambivalent attitude.

Coming back to the DC area meant rejoining something like normal life. I have already told the story of my strange evening at the fabric store. We were deciding to go to Fort Lewis for the memorial dedication ceremony at the beginning of October, though it was going to be a logistical challenge to get Anna (who was working full-time) and Maria (who was taking classes at Catholic University) out there and back with minimal disruption. Matthew was worried about flying that far after our trip to Phoenix (the flight back had been a bit bumpy and then the lady in the seat behind him had a "cardiac event" which was a trifle alarming). I was scheduled for some minor surgery in September which was going to require a little healing time, and I was also supposed to be training for the Team River Runner biathlon with Juli, described earlier in this blog. Nonetheless, it seemed important for us to go and I spent a good deal of time making the arrangements, both flight and hotel, much to the dismay of the Army which had intended to do both. In the end, I waited too long to get rooms at the hotel where some of the other families were staying near Fort Lewis, and we ended up instead with a hotel in downtown Olympia, Washington. Since I grew up there and spent my summer vacations working for the state within a few blocks of this place, I knew exactly where we were going. It was going to feel a little odd--my family has a lot of history in that town--but I had no idea of how odd it was going to get.