As milspouses on the move, we don’t often have a specific physical place where we build up years of memories. It isn’t like we have a favorite path we can walk daily and then reflect on how it (and we) can change and grow over the seasons and decades. Since we are by nature nomadic, we have to come up with other benchmarks to use when we reflect on our lives. For me, the book Blue Highways has served as my tool for reflection.

I am about to re-read the book for probably the 20th time. Blue Highways is a book I bought at the college bookstore before . . . everything–before becoming an Army wife, before finishing growing up, everything. The author was a professor at my university, and I remember wondering at the time if I should take one of his classes, as I had not met an author before. Instead, I knew them through their writing.