Letter #18 - Brenda

This week I have been feeling very homesick for Europe.  I think this is in part because this project forces me to spend a lot of time thinking about the people in my life, which of course includes all of the people from that time in my life as well.  I also have been chatting with a friend of mine who is soon to become an expat as she moves her family to Brazil, and that has had me very focused on my family's experiences.  This brought me to Brenda for today's letter.

Brenda and her husband were expats living in Germany while my family was in the Netherlands.  They were also church members, which is how our lives became intertwined.  I was never excited to travel to Germany when we lived there.  Partly because of my own cultural biases (I was living in one of the most devastated cities of WWII... those wounds haven't quite healed in most people), and partly because there were never any kids our age, usually a heavy concentration of older people who didn't speak much or any English, and it was BORING for my brother and I to be on those trips.  Brenda and her husband gave us a reason to look forward to going there.  When mom and dad would announce a trip to Germany, our first question was "are Brenda & Meredith going to be there?"


Writing to Brenda allowed me to remember many happy times spent with them, at camps, in their home, shopping at the American Stores on base where they worked... Mum and I were lucky enough to spend some time with them last year at our church's world conference, and so I was also able to reflect on those conversations.  Brenda has a warm and inviting spirit.  She is very motherly, and quite elegant.  She is someone who will always make me feel at home, because we were lucky enough to share the incredible experience of living outside of our own culture and language, and learning to see the world in a whole new light.  Granted we went through these experiences as two very different people in two very different places in our lives, but we still share the core of that experience, which is something I share with fewer and fewer people in my life as I've become more "geographically stable" as I like to call it.