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How And Where Did You Live The First Four Years Of Your Marriage?

Discussion in 'Places I Have Lived' started by Lon Tanner, Sep 26, 2021.

  1. Bibbi Wright

    Bibbi Wright Very Well-Known Member
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    @Hal Pollner Why bother commenting at all?
     
    #16
    Last edited: Nov 1, 2021
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  2. Janice Lynne

    Janice Lynne Well-Known Member
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    Oh, this is easy!

    Steve and I married in 1970 and lived off-season in a beach cottage in Michigan City for four months. There was still an ice rim on the beach in May! We headed south to Mississippi so he could visit the draft board in his home town and apply for Conscientious Objector status. Yeah, we were both strongly anti-war, though not ready to run off to Canada.

    Rather than go back north for the interim, we went to Brooksville, where there was a Trappist monastery Steve had discovered during his motorcycle ramblings while in college in Starksville. Those monks there raised beef cattle and rode horses! They also knew of an open job on a dairy farm just down the road.

    So we lived until the end of 1970 in a tenant house that I wouldn't mind having today --- plenty of room, lots of trees, a big garden overseen by the farm owner's housekeeper, Mizz Berryman. Weird time for me, since I was freshly from The North and had never heard a deeply rural Southern accent before. Probably I was seen as an ignorant, arrogant Yankee due to all the misunderstandings that ensued!

    We left there in November and stayed with his parents in Indiana until the Draft called him up the next spring. I went back to Michigan while he was in basic training, then joined him in San Antonio at some point. I've lost track of the timetable, but it was massively hot and humid and surreal when I arrived there in the middle of the night. Halos around all the streetlights, bugs and bats swooping around.

    Found another adorable cottage to stay in, within walking distance of the base. Downtown was a festival on weekend nights, full of Army guys wearing bellbottoms and peace symbols, and music of all sorts, most memorably a Jamaican musician who played reggae on fifty-gallon drum he'd cut and bent into an amazingly versatile instrument. If you went to the old World's Fair site instead, there'd be flamenco dancing and food.

    When Steve's training as an Army psychologist was done, he got orders to Vietnam as an exit counselor, but was reassigned to Fort Harrison, Indiana, in the same role, due to his dad's health. We lived near Indianapolis, in another military-family-rental-enclave, and stayed there until he was discharged.

    In the meantime, one of Steve's friends from the Brooksville Monastery had left the priesthood and started family life in Alabama. He, Tom, knew of counselling job in Selma, so we headed back South. Loved Selma! I'd had a lot more experience with southern accents by then, and didn't annoy people nearly as often.

    We lived just across the Edmond Pettus Bridge, in a little house on the edge of a corn field. Sadly, the marriage had been going bad for a while, and ended just about four years after it started. I went to Pensacola, and he back to Starksville to finish college.
     
    #17
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  3. Laura Jones

    Laura Jones Well-Known Member
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    We spent the first four years of our marriage living overseas in Germany as that was my husband’s first duty station in the army. I enjoyed it and didn’t enjoy it as I had a newborn baby and a small toddler and spent much of my time inside as the weather at that time was very harsh and my son had chronic respiratory problems. There were times that we did have a chance to do a little traveling though and went down to the Alps to stay at the arm forces recreation center hotel which was beautiful. I also had the chance to go out to eat at some of the restaurants called gasthouses and I enjoyed the German food very much in particular I loved the schnitzel and noodles. Our family was definitely ready to come back to the United States though and I wanted to kiss the ground when I got off the airplane and we were tickled pink to be back home!
     
    #18
  4. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    We spent the first year or so of our marriage in Edcouch, Texas. We then moved to where we now live in Millinocket, Maine.
     
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