THIS IS ANNA & ANNA 2- Now, everyone can listen!
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ANNA:
When she is fourteen, her family moves to Holmes Chapel and Anna forms an immediate bond with Harry, the green-eyed boy next door. Friends first, they explore life in their picturesque Eng...
**** A/N- The first chapters are important to set up the story. This story is about ANNA, but don't you worry. Harry is coming soon, I promise!
~Spring 2007-Summer 2008~
~Up to 2007~
Anna POV:
I'd never called a place 'home' for more than two years. Even then, could you really call it home if you know you won't be staying there? You see, I am the child of a Norwegian mother and a Military father. My family, mom- Elinor, dad- Michael, my sister- Sofie, and me- Anna, followed dad wherever his next deployment landed him.
My parents were adventurous, dad having met mom at nineteen when she was studying abroad in the United States. They had a whirlwind romance, got engaged quickly (mom has never told me exactly how fast) and were married in Italy five months later. I came along eleven months after the wedding and we almost immediately moved to the next location on the map. Mom with me, a tiny baby at the time, wrapped close to her chest for the journey.
That was just the first of the many moves I would make over the next thirteen years. Life was nothing if not an adventure. We all loved to travel the world, and we saw a lot of it. No matter where we unpacked our bags, the one thing my parents were always so good at was finding ways to ground Sofie and me, no matter where it was that we were calling home wt the time.
** Anna and Sofie when they were younger.
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That was until 2006.
I had just turned thirteen. Sofie was ten. We were living in South Carolina, close to Gram and Grandpa, which was nice for a change. Having blood relatives close by was a not a luxury we had often in military life. This particular set of relatives was my dad's parents who just happened to be the sweetest southern couple you would ever meet. Everything around them was always spoken with sir or ma'am and they required manners and hugs, but otherwise loved everyone they met unconditionally. Dad definitely got that trait from them. He loved us all with such abandon, which is why I think we could follow him around the world and still feel like we weren't missing out on anything.
That Friday in May, we skipped home from school. We were greeted by the scent of fresh monster cookies wafting out of the kitchen. We knew they were made by Gram, who had come to visit for the long weekend and distract us from dad having been deployed for over six months now. The house full of women had been cooking up a storm, when just before 5:00pm, there was a knock at the door.
Sofie ran to answer it and immediately returned to the kitchen to grab our mom. When mom made her way around the corner and saw the men standing in the doorway, she dropped to her knees.
There was only one reason that four uniformed men would be at the front door on a Friday afternoon on a military base. My dad wasn't going to be returning home from his deployment.
Military kids had this unhealthy awareness of the weight of their families sacrifice, but that didn't mean the pain was any less when their door was the one that got knocked on. The one thing that military families did have, that others may not, is an immediate network of people that step in, and step up, to help with everything.
