By Jacey Eckhart I've never seen her swim. I can only imagine Ginger in the water. I imagine her in goggles, her face turned to the bottom of the pool, her feet kicking out a rhythm, a cool flip turn at the end of the lane. I imagine Ginger in peace.

In hindsight, the way those people entered the garden seems perfectly clear. They fell in love with (or gave birth to) this darling boy who longed to be a Navy SEAL. He deployed over and over because that was his job. Then this one bizarre day, insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter way over in Afghanistan. Twenty-two Navy SEALs and eight other American service members were killed.

I'm sure the guitarist at the Ocean House restaurant thought I was crazy. I know my family did.

I used to claim that after deployment our family was like a merry-go-round. We had to slow the "ride" so that Brad could jump back on. Brad scoffs at that now. "This is no merry-go-round," he snarled. "This is the Scrambler!"

Building Happily Ever After with a military dude requires spouses to master two "initial" sets of skills: D-ployment and M-ployment. And to tell you the truth, I think the M-ployment skills are harder. Because as long as you are still breathing at the end of deployment, you can count yourself as D-ployment skilled. You know you ain't got M-ployment skills until you have a J-O-B.

Brad had been home from deployment about a week when the accusations came thick and fast. "You take all his time!" "You have all the fun!" "You just want to be alone!"

They wore yellow ribbons. When I skipped up to the international arrivals gate for my husband's seventh homecoming, I spotted this pair wearing yellow satin ribbons around their waists. So I just had to stand next to them. "Are you waiting for someone to come home from deployment?" I asked, certain that anyone who wears yellow satin ribbon in public wants to be asked about it.

After the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and subsequent radiation leakage from Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, nearly 7,000 military family members from five U.S. military bases in Japan left the country under the volunteer evacuation plan. That's when the attacks commenced.

This week our ombudsman sent out the standard list of homecoming dos and don’ts.

"War has a gender  - and it is male," wrote author and essayist Virginia Woolf in 1938.  Eh, I don't think that is so true today.