Community love
My husband’s National Guard unit in Ohio had deployed right after we moved to Wyoming; they rushed his paperwork through to get him out of their system before they left. In Laramie, Wyoming, he discovered that a PhD in Economics from the University of Wyoming would require advanced math, not his strength. So he looked for another PhD program. He found Capella University, mostly online with two weeks a year in person attendance. It was expensive to live in a college town, so he asked me where I would like to move to. I said we had lived close to his parents for years; now we ought to look for a place close to my parents. We traveled to my parents’ home in northern Wyoming and looked around. There were few available homes that we could afford to rent. The huge house next to my parents’ home turned out to have weeping cast iron sewer lines. We ran out of places to look at. My parents asked around. A friend of a friend of a friend suggested a house in Emblem, Wyoming. We looked at the map; my husband was horrified. “That better be an awesome house,” he said. Emblem is far away from everything.
We went to look at the house in the late afternoon; both of us stood on the front porch, not even inside yet, and felt confirmation: this is the right place. We went inside and found out why the Lord wanted us to know right away that this was it. The living room was humongous, with WHITE carpet. There were three huge picture windows. There was a kitchen with a tiny space for a table. There were barley fields on three sides, and an apple orchard on the fourth side, with irrigation ditches deep enough to drown in. There were huge outbuildings full of mechanical equipment we would have to keep our children out of. The nearest post office was a half-mile away, but the nearest actual town was six miles, and the nearest children were across the highway and the huge fields. But there were four bedrooms, and a garage big enough to park the 15 passenger van indoors in the winter!!!
The Laramie National Guard unit deployed right after we moved to Emblem; they rushed his paperwork so he would be able to move away.
We rented the house in Emblem for two years. It was 20 minutes from my parents. My husband enrolled at Capella University and joined a National Guard unit in Powell, Wyoming. Six months later I got pregnant with child number six. A month after that, my husband left for Iraq. He served 15 months, with a two-week break in the middle when he came home for our daughter’s birth. We had the most community support we had ever had anywhere; my parents, of course, but also lots of help from people in the nearby town. They volunteered to take our children to swim lessons, trick-or-treating, to Scout activities. They brought us food, fixed our furnace, assembled furniture, and visited us. They gave us Christmas gifts. Our children picked raspberries for a local business. They unloaded our moving truck when we arrived and gathered to load it again when we moved away. They showed us their love.
