The Story of Barb's House

This Is The Story of Barb's House.
Barb and Sean used to live here a long, long time ago, back when it snowed so much that glaciers a mile high covered Misawa, and the winter was twenty-seven months long. Really, it was that bad. Just ask anybody.

As I was saying, way back when, Barb and her little munchkin lived for a couple years in this corner apartment of a fourplex on Misawa Air Base.

More than a dozen years later, I was assigned to Misawa. Almost the first thing we did was set out on a walkabout of the base. Barb wanted to see if she could remember anything. Turned out, she didn't, until we wandered over to the side of the base where she used to live. Then she found herself on familiar ground.

This is what her house looked like all those years later.

Strangely enough, we moved into quarters that were right across the street and down a little ways from Barb's old house. She could see it from our bedroom window.

Even a bit more strangely, while we were looking for pictures of her house in photo albums, we ran across a picture she took from the front porch. For no reason she can think of, she took a picture of the place across the street where she would live with us twelve years later.

The picture on the left is the snapshot she took years ago. The picture on the right is a photo I snapped from the same place, looking the same direction. Our quarters are to the right of the tree trunk.

Here's another nifty little before-and-after shot from her front porch.

This must be one of the legendary snowfalls I keep hearing about. Barb's car looks to be buried about up to the hubcaps.

A few months after we moved in, a funny thing happened.

"Funny" in a sort of weird, heartbreaking way. Barb didn't find it all that funny, but, y'know, sometimes you can go back, and sometimes they tear your darned house down.

They didn't stop until they'd pulled it all down, dug up the foundations, pulled up the pipes, cut down the trees, and scraped all the grass off the top.

Then they buried the whole lot under thirty feet of dirt. I mean, these guys were thorough.