The Foreign Service Journal, May 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2019 67 L ast summer, after 29 years of ser- vice and seven overseas assign- ments, we left Warsaw, Poland, to come home for good. When you are done, you are done: I hit the gas and sped away from overseas life as soon as my last long flight with airsick cats landed at Dulles. The Foreign Service has been getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror ever since. Figuring that Washington, D.C., was the closest thing we had to a hometown, we decided tomove into our small “empty- nester” house in the leafy Virginia suburbs and take it from there. The truck filled with our storage fromHagerstown disgorged many mysterious items, from a recliner that we didn’t remember owning to some- thing called a “cordless phone system.” Meanwhile, our household effects had apparently multiplied while in crates over the Atlantic. The Polish pottery was espe- cially prolific; what did I think I was going to do with all those flowery little sugar bowls, creamers and teaspoons? It took a year or so, but after a lot of online selling, uncounted donation runs and begging neighbors to take items on “freecycle” groups, even the storage unit has been emptied. I have become extremely creative with closets and under-bed boxes, and every- thing we own in this world is now in one place. (Including our adult son, with all his stuff—but that’s another story.) Our house is now a comfortable home, no longer merely a warehouse for ethno-plunder. When you know you’re going to be living somewhere indefinitely, it’s worth making some changes. We gutted the kitchen and installed a new, super- efficient galley kitchen designed by yours truly. No more flat-white painted walls, cheap melamine cabinets or dwarfish appliances with Euroglyphs on the dials. Every once in a while, I open my oven just to admire how big it is. (After years spent stuffing clothes into tiny European washing machines, my full-size, front- loading washer and dryer can bring tears to my eyes.) We topped it off with a big screened porch, the ultimate reward for years of apartment life. It is funky, comfortable and so very American. Enjoying dinner on the porch, listening to the birds and Kelly Bembry Midura writes from a porch in Reston, Virginia, after tours with her now-retired FSO spouse in Bolivia, Guatemala, El Sal- vador, Zambia, the Czech Republic, Austria and Poland. Read about her adventures at wellthatwasdifferent.com. Objects in the RearviewMirror BY KE L LY BEMBRY M I DURA FAMILY MEMBER MATTERS I feel a bit like I am recovering from a rocky marriage to the State Department. I divorced that guy—threw his crap out the window onto the lawn!—and I have no regrets.