We weren’t looking for a globe, or actually anything at all, for that matter. Aimless was the point, the peregrination of our four feet, sizes one and nine, carrying us in squares around our neighborhood on Garage Sale Day. This, of course, is exactly what it sounds like, when everyone who half wants to have a garage sale (which is everyone, if they’re honest)—but doesn’t want to do much work to tell anyone about it—has a garage sale on the same Saturday. All over the neighborhood, most streets feature tables full of old stuffed animals and dishes, less-old TVs and sporting equipment, and brand-new candles received from colleagues at office gift exchanges. It’s a good time, as long as you’re not looking for anything in particular. Which, again, we weren’t.

This was good for us, for my eldest daughter, Luci, and me. For her, because “picking something out” is her dearest wish on any outing, a wish always at odds with my own. We’re not at the grocery store so she can, I don’t know, grab those little ice molds that are hanging by the cake mix for some reason, and this fills her with woe. For me, it’s good because shopping—for groceries or appliances or even and especially clothes—has lost a lot of its luster lately. I’ve become task-oriented and efficient, a list-completing precision device of consumption, and while this is probably good from some perspectives, it’s a little boring from others. Today is a way to go shopping without spending a lot of money on new things. Instead, I’ll spend a little money, precisely the $10 that I have in my wallet, on old things.

Our first purchase set the garage sale bar unreasonably high. The local community center parking lot had transformed into a full-on flea market. Though I imagined this was for those without garages or front yards from which to sell their goods, it quickly became clear that it was, in fact, more of a spontaneous antique fair, where vintage Corningware and European pitchers were tempting but, alas, more than $10. We were getting ready head back towards the lower-key sidewalk sales when my daughter spotted a pair of bright red Chuck Taylors, the very shoes she’d been asking for for months.

“The shoes of your dreams!” I declared, stooping down to examine them. They looked almost new but huge, and prepared myself to tell her so as I pulled the tongue up. “They might be too… oh. No, they’re exactly your size.”

She looked back at me with her eyes saucer-gigantic, holding back the querelous “Mommmmm, pleeeeeeeeeease!” that had gotten many a grocery-store request firmly declined.

“OK, how much for the shoes?” I ask the teenager manning the cash shoebox.

“Five dollars?” she replies.

“Sold,” I say, handing her the ten. (I’d always wanted to say that in a real way. Apparently I just needed to find a really good deal on shoes.) Collecting our change and our shoes, we turn toward home.

Garage Sale Day, it must be said, is a little dead at our end of town, so it’s several blocks before we encounter one last super-sale, three neighbors’ worth of goods arrayed on the grass strips in front of their homes. Politely declining to take home the dilapidated clown that was offered to us—for free!—by one of them, we instead we find a globe. It’s a pretty typical globe, spinning graceful on a tall pedestal. We used to have a globe, but we also used to have daughters ages two and five, who thought the globe would be better first as a ball off its stand, and then later cleft at the tape equator into two cardboard bowls. Then we didn’t have one anymore.

Perhaps now, I thought, we could try again. Five more dollars gets us both globe and a big metal basket, and we walk home, me with shoes and basket, my daughter carrying the whole world two whole blocks.

And it’s when we get home, when that colorful ball of names spins under my girls’ eager fingers, that we realize just how far away Dad is going to be for a while.

When people ask me how long I’ve known that my husband is deploying with the Air Force, the answer is more complicated than you’d think. Technically, I’ve known this was a possibility since he joined, ten years ago as a chaplain for the reserves. It’s been probable for the last three years, and more likely than not since last fall. But even then, the military being what it is, various uncertainties kept it tenuous until February. So I’ve known for a while, I guess, but I’ve been seriously expecting it for somewhat less time than that.

In our military-light city, I’ve had some explaining to do this week, as I’ve shared with my kids’ teachers and classmates’ parents what’s going on in our lives this summer and fall. I’ve reassured others often that this is the best point in history to be in our position, that it’s relatively safe, even if it’s far away, and that technology closes the distance a bit, even if it can’t do much about the time apart.

Because I’m me, forever stuck in either metaphor or history or both, the comparisons are pretty stark. I think about the characters from War and Peace, heading off to fight Napoleon without a return date to give their loved ones. I think of Marmee reading letters to the March girls around the fire, daughters hanging off an armchair and every syllable their father wrote home from the Civil War. I think of all the families in history separated by conflict, without contact or the promise of future reunion, and I’m ridiculously grateful that I know when I’ll see my family together again.

Even in current the context of military families, who move every three years and have multiple deployments over the course of their careers, many longer than a year, this two-season affair is pretty brief. I think a lot about my childhood best friend, raising six kids during many seasons apart from her Marine husband. Beyond the military, there are many reasons people are parenting alone, and nearly all of them are more painful and permanent than this.

And yet, it’s the other side of the world. It’s a summer—the best season, the season we look forward to sharing with our kids—that we’re separated. Which, context aside, just isn’t great.

“Where does Caro live?” my youngest, Ellie, asks, running her fingers over the spines of the Cascades, the Rockies, the Appalachians. I point to Massachusetts, where their favorite babysitter moved last summer.

“What about Grammy?” asks Luci, and I put a finger on the Florida peninsula.

“Who else do we know that lives far away?” Ellie asks.

“Well, Ellen lives here,” I say, squinting to find Germany in the busy crowd of Central Europe. “A lot of our friends live here. Lexi, Katrina, Jill…”

“That’s where we used to live too,” Luci reminds me, and I nod, walking my fingers east.

“This is the farthest away home I’ve ever been,” I say, remembering the wide skies and ruined fortresses of Oradea, where I visited for a week a lifetime ago. “Romania.”

I remember a student that I taught in Germany, a girl whose parents worked in Hawaii. We would always ask students how long it would take them to get home on school breaks, to Turkey or Russia or Mongolia where their parents lived. She always won, and we always joked that it didn’t really matter which way around the world she took to get back there. When you live on the other side, directly through the solid globe, it’s the same long trip in either direction.

That’s how this feels, like we’re standing on opposite poles of a cardboard globe, our green city on one side and the hot, dry Elsewhere (whose name we’re not allowed to commit to the untamed Internet) on the other. We’ve read books and watched YouTube videos about it, and soon we’ll be receiving daily tours when we call, but right now, it’s more of an imaginary land, like Narnia, than somewhere a person could actually go. I think about how our world will grow larger, because one of us will have seen a lot of it, how we’ll learn and grow during this season, ending it expanded and connected in new ways. That’s my prayer.

A few days later, I run into my college roommate and her son at the zoo, and later that day another friend calls me on the phone and we chat about summer plans and getting our kids together again sometime soon. Ellie’s preschool teacher arrives with going-away presents and staying-behind presents, all of them edible, and tells me she’d love to hang out with my kids anytime and that her husband will repair anything that needs repairing. The moms on the playground ask how I am, and fill the air with ways we’ll pass the time when school is out. Another friend prays for us on the Sunday before we leave, dropping everything to gather in the kitchen and send him off well. Everywhere I go are questions, but the kind that make me feel seen and heard. The kind that remind me I’m not alone, that even in this city that’s so famous for its coldness, I’m lucky to find myself in a village.

I’ll sit in city parks and watch my girls make friends with strangers. Again I’ll marvel at the capacity of their small hearts, how they can miss their favorite person with all of them, yet still have plenty of space to spend an afternoon in the company of small strangers, eagerly playing new games and exchanging names and stories. How I can be lonely for him, missing my own favorite person and the humor, hope and hospitality with which he makes us all better and braver, and yet still overwhelmed by the kindness of the community of family and friends that surrounds us.

“So where’s Dad going to be?” Ellie asks, her finger still resolutely stationed on the babysitter’s new home.

“There.” I turn the globe a bit, search a bit, and drop a fingertip. I try to imagine it and the details are theoretical, snatched up from filming locations of sci fi movies more than real life. For a moment both girls are quiet, pondering distances and geography they can fathom even less than I can.

“Well,” Ellie decides. “I think we should visit Caro, then. She lives so close!”

And I laugh, turning the globe back from the East Coast (so close!) to our village, the tiny Puget Sound where we’ll spend the next few seasons, our hearts anchored to this spinning earth by those we love—and one we love most of all—on the other side of it.