The outpouring of love from our countrymen to our troops never ceases to amaze me. The charitable organizations and the dedicated individuals who send letters and boxes and supplies, well, there are no words to describe how wonderful their commitment is. I am so happy that our troops are well supported, for they deserve all the attention they can get.
I have, however, made it my one-woman mission to support the homefront.
A long while back, I wrote about how one is the loneliest number, how going through a deployment without children or pets is a lonely existence. That's how I lived my life for 13 months, and I remember vividly how quiet the house gets. So I'm on a quest to adopt single spouses.
I currently have two good friends who find themselves in this situation. One is a friend who's still back in Germany; all her friends PCSed away and she got stop-moved there alone for the next 15 months. Another is a wife who was in the middle of a move when her husband got called back up on IRR. They had already sold their house and she'd quit her job, so she found herself completely rootless heading into a deployment. Both my friends have limited local support and just generally feel out of sorts. So that's where I come in!
When my husband was gone, I had a friend from back home who started sending me snail mail. Regularly. I realized that her letters were filling a communication void in my life, and I can't even express how important these letters became to me. So I'm on a mission to do the same for my two friends. I have been sending them weekly mail and packages, just so they know that someone cares about them. They're shouldering the burden of supporting their husbands, so I think someone needs to step in to support them.
Luckily, both of these cool ladies are knitters like I am, so I hatched a plan for a knit-along. I'm buying the yarn today to send on to them so we can get started soon. I wanted to post this here on SpouseBUZZ in case there are any other knitters out there who want to join our knit-along. (And for those who don't have any idea what I'm talking about, a knit-along is where knitters hook up to make the same project at the same time.)
Here's what we're making:
I found this excellent project while bumming around the internet. This picture comes from a knitting blog called 10 Feet High. I just can't wait to make this scarf.
If there are other SpouseBuzz knitters out there, please join us on our deployment knit-along! Entrelac is not as hard as it looks, and the yarn does all the color changes for you.
The knitting pattern is the Danica pattern from Knitty.com
The scarf takes three skeins of Patons Soy Wool Stripes.
OK, so I'll concede the fact that maybe a knit-along isn't for everyone. But perhaps you could come up with a different way to Support the Homefront. Do you have a friend who's all alone, or know someone who could just use some extra support right now? Can you send a card in the mail just to let him/her know you care?
I'm telling you, that kind of mail does wonders for the soul...for the recipient and the sender.
