Texas Heart {Epilogue - Part 1}

Grant and I sat in the busy and crowded Los Angeles International Airport.

It was November, and we had been married two months.

The past two months had been wonderful, but also really different. Those seven weeks (after our honeymoon), we had been living in Yuma, Arizona while Grant attended a training exercise with the Marine Corps called WTI.

Most Marines do not bring their wives to WTI. First off, it isn't practical because the Marine Corps doesn't provide married housing, but secondly, most wives wouldn't want to go because their husbands work practically 24/7.

But. . . we were newly married and we wanted to be together, so Grant rented a small apartment off base for the short time we would be there.

I had never been to Arizona in my life. It was so different.

The town of Yuma felt rundown and old in some places, but in other places it looked brand new as restaurants and stores were opening up to support the growing military population.

I remember so vividly the night that Grant and I pulled into the apartment complex where we would be staying. Our car was jam-packed full of stuff. While Grant went inside the front office to pick up our key, I looked down at the temperature gauge in the car. It read 104 degrees, and it was 10pm.

We unloaded our car and entered the apartment that would be our temporary home. I tried to hide my shock from Grant as I gazed at its decrepit condition. The carpet and furniture were "worn" to say the least, there was a musty smell, the paint was peeling, and there were dead bugs in every corner.

It didn't exactly scream honeymoon, but at least we would be together.

When we awoke the next morning, Grant and I got in the car and drove to a church that we had looked up the night before. As we drove toward the outskirts of town, we could see desert for miles on end.

"Couldn't you just imagine cowboys and indians riding over that ridge at any moment?" Grant asked me as he pointed to a small mountain of jagged rocks in the distance.

"Yeah, I could," I said gazing out the window at all the dust and sand and cacti.

Those two months in Yuma were some of the sweetest and hardest times for me as a newly married woman. Grant was gone twelve hours almost every day, including Saturdays, while I was all alone in the middle of nowhere.

I tried to make the best use of my time. I figured out how to kill ants that were inside and I spent lots of time staring at the pigeons that lived on our front balcony. I wrote all our thank-you notes for our wedding gifts. I drove down almost every street in Yuma, even crossing over into California once by mistake. I read through a lot of the Old Testament, and spent lots of time in the laundromat washing camis and undershirts and socks. I sat by the pool sometimes, when there weren't creepy people around.

It was hard, especially on days when I knew Grant was miles away in the desert and completely unreachable.

Even though I was married, I felt isolated. Before Grant and I were married, I was in familiar surroundings, I was working and spending time with friends and family, but now all that was gone.

I found myself drawing close to the Lord once again and looking to Him for friendship. 

Even though those couple months out in Yuma were lonely, they were also wonderful. Sunday was my absolute favorite day because Grant had the entire day off. We would go to the earliest service at  church and then spend the entire day doing fun things.

We would often go running together, sometimes on base or sometimes on a dirt road on the outskirts of the desert. One day we even ran into a pack of jackrabbits. I remember saying out of surprise, "Grant look at all the bunnies!" I was promptly corrected.

We would go on long drives and Grant would turn on one of his favorite Texas country singers, Robert Earl Keen.

During the week, I would be washing dishes (we didn't have a dishwasher) and catch myself singing, "It's hotter than a furnace fan out in Arizona."

We also spent lot and lots of time talking about our future. How many kids would we have? What would their names be and what would they look like? Where would Grant go to seminary? Where would Grant end up pastoring one day? Where did we want to settle down? 

It was a sweet time. A time I would never forget.

But now, we were sitting in Los Angeles, preparing for another chapter in our lives ~ Japan.

Japan was where Grant was stationed in the Marine Corps, and now I was joining him as his wife.

We didn't know how long we would be there. We could potentially be there longer than originally planned.

All along, I had been so excited about living in Japan with Grant. I really wasn't scared or nervous at all.

As Grant and I sat by our gate waiting for our plane to board, I called all of my family and said good-bye one last time. It would be a few days before we got our internet hooked up and it would be a long time before I would have an American cell phone again.

I powered off my phone and put it in my bag. I suddenly felt light-headed and faint.

"GraceAnna, are you okay?" Grant looked at me, concerned.

My eyes filled with tears. I was scared. For the first time in this whole process of getting married, and moving, and really my whole life changing, I was completely overcome by fear.

We boarded the plane and sat down. It felt dark and crowded. I tried to relax, but I couldn't.

"GraceAnna, can I pray for you?" Grant asked, sensing my continued distress.

Grant prayed, but I didn't feel any better.

I felt the plane begin to move down the runway. I wanted to stop it somehow. I wanted to jump off the plane before it took off. I knew being with Grant was everything that I wanted and I didn't want to spend one moment without him; but leaving everything I had ever known to go to a place that I had never been, this was harder than I had imagined.

{to be continued in Part 2 of Epilogue}