Day 5: {Five Minute Friday} Welcome

I am joining in with Lisa Jo and her Five Minute Fridays for my Day 5 post today.  These have been great prompts over the last few weeks to get me writing and thinking creatively.  And I love the word for this week: welcome.

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I could hear happy shouts of jumping kids on the trampoline as I carried the Beware of Dog signs, nails and a hammer out to the front fence.  Our previous signs had not survived a big windstorm.  This was the kind of job I wouldn’t normally do, but when your husband is deployed, you pick up the hammer and put the signs up yourself.

My stomach was fluttery as I held the sign and began pounding in the first nail.  My cell phone nestled in my pocket and I was waiting, waiting for it to ring.  My happy, jumping kids were oblivious that today their Daddy was making his way home for his two-week R & R in the middle of his deployment to Afghanistan.   

I wanted his coming to be a surprise, to just pile into the car and head to the airport once he called to say he had arrived.  Should be any time now.

I stopped hammering and looked over my shoulder at a strange van pulling up in the neighbor’s driveway…an airport shuttle van.

Is that?….could that be?…would he have?….then the door opened, a thick, Army-issue boot stepped out, and it was him.  No longer on the Skype screen, but here in front of me.

Long hugs, long kisses, long looks…

Oh, the kids!  I run to the back, “Hey kids!  Who do you want to see most in the whole wide world?”

“George Washington!” (seriously, someone said that!)  Try again!

“Daddy!!!” 

So the four of us ran out front where my husband still stood, tall and thin in his uniform.  He bent down and his arms were full of his three children, squeezing, laughing, kissing…welcoming.

Welcome home, my love.

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