Miranda Lambert - The House That Built Me

SGT (Join to see) good day Brother Charlie, always informational and of the most interesting. Thanks for sharing, have a blessed day!

I grew up in the Philippines as a military brat. It was a place where friends and girlfriends came and went due to the transient nature of the military. All of us experienced the brilliance of youth and the pain of saying goodbyes. In tenth grade I was smitten with a Thai girl. Siricha was kind and beautiful. I asked her to go with me, but she declined. Oh well, we can’t always win in life. Her family PCSed back to the states and I thought that was the end of that.

We lived in a rather nice home with wood and marble floors. There was a pool and clubhouse for all the tenants of our subdivision 50 yards from my house. Sometimes I was lucky. I watched sudden rain showers race across the vast sugarcane fields as I sat on the patio of the clubhouse. They looked like curtains blowing over the sugarcane field. Palm fronds danced in the wind, birds flew with purpose, and the rain nurtured the parched land. Sometimes the sun was out during the showers. I would not have known I would have absorbed all this to remember it a few decades later.

I missed the Philippines. Every single friend I grew up with missed the hell out of that country. It would be the golden era of our lives. We had the innocence of our youth and life was relatively care free. However, we are all sad because the Philippines would never be our home despite growing up there. I probably won’t go back there, there is nothing much for me there.

Last year Siricha called me out of the blue. She tried to find me for 38 years and confided that I was the best thing to grace her life and apologized for turning me down. I had erased her from my heart and memory because it was my way of dealing with rejection. Hearing her voice and listening to her stunned me. Then I became sad all over again. I thought what could have been. My parents even liked her. I am glad she got her closure. Who am I to deny her that. Sometimes in my life I am a stepping stone, so others can progress in life, and sometimes assume and understand that role with an open heart.