Houses, Homes, and Finding My Proper Ground : Catching up with Kimberlee Bethany Bonura
Houses, Homes, and Finding My Proper Ground
by Kimberlee Bethany Bonura, PhD, MFA, E-RYT, CYT
Home is where the Army* sends you. That’s what we always say, right? So how do we find a home, and make a home, once the Army* stops sending us anywhere? (*Insert your Branch of Service.)
I was my mom’s military brat for the first 18 years of my life. In my first post for MilspoFAN, I wrote about my MFA in Creative Writing, as a journey to understand my mom’s career as a female service member and my life as my mother’s daughter: https://www.milspofan.com/2021/07/28/an-interview-with-kimberlee-bethany-bonura-ph-d-mfa-e-ryt-cyt/.
I spent 18 years in support of my husband’s military career. In my second post for MilspoFAN, I considered how art helps me to survive, and my family’s initial transition to retirement: https://www.milspofan.com/2023/05/10/why-are-we-artists-thoughts-at-the-end-of-my-military-spouse-journey-with-dr-kimberlee-bonura/.
Across my forty-seven years of life, my longest stretch, so far, in a single place is 4 years 6 months. Shout out to Kirtland Air Force Base and the Greater Albuquerque, New Mexico area, specifically the small Rio Grande Village of Corrales, which I will always remember as the home where my kiddos were babies.
Often, in military life, people ask you: where is your dream retirement home? But when you live in so many places (I’m at 30+ cities/towns across 15 states, plus Washington DC, and 3 foreign countries), you learn that every place has its pros and cons. More activities or more nature. More restaurants or more local produce. Mild winters or comfortable summers. No place is perfect. There is no town, no home that ever feels exactly right. When you’re not “from” anywhere, how do you ever find a place where you truly “belong”?
I keep thinking of these lines from Phillip Larkin (from the poem, “Places, Loved Ones”):
No, I have never found
The place where I could say
This is my proper ground,
Here I shall stay
Here’s the thing about military life: it creates instant community, a sense that we’re all in it together. You move in, and right away you attend a hail and farewell. We’re people, so there are always cliques and gossip. But also, we are people who know the difference between big stuff and little stuff. Because we all live with the shared understanding that at any moment, some of us could be sent away into a dangerous situation, and that some of those people who get sent away, might not come back (or might come back with life-altering injuries).
In a military community, the rules about what you can and can’t do are clear: literally clear, written in protocol books and policy documents. If you accidentally violate a rule in how you plant your garden or decorate your yard, one of your neighbors is going to bring that rule book and show you exactly what you’ve done wrong (by line item) and probably offer to help you fix it, or at least loan you the needed tools.
Also, in a military community, you know that even if you and the spouse across the street don’t like each other, in an emergency (a spouse deployed, a kid sick, a parent in the emergency room), you’ll help each other. Because in a crisis, a community pulls together, no questions asked. In many ways, growing up and spending my married years in military communities reminded me of the same ethics of my maternal grandparents’ midwestern rural farm lives. In their Minnesota and Dakota families, there were lots of stories about poker games gone wrong, romantic intrigue, and battles over jam recipes. But they also had the got-your-back mentality that if someone’s cow was stuck in a frozen pond, someone’s baby was sick in the middle of the night, or someone’s barn came down in a tornado, you helped out, because working together is how everyone survived.
It's an understatement to say that, when my husband retired, I wasn’t prepared for the emotional shift to civilian life.
My family was excited to choose our home. The house we bought needed far more work than we had expected, planned, or budgeted. Our first six months were a never-ending Ruck March of repairs. As we approached our first spring, we planned an exterior paint job. I involved my kids in picking a joyful color palate to match the spring flower bulbs my mom and I were planting in the garden.
My mom planting fall bulbs with one of my kiddos.
Gardening is art in nature, and here is one of our flower bulb planting designs.
Though I still don’t understand what we did, it’s clear that we did something to upset our neighbors. We let a contractor leave his vehicle in our yard overnight; someone used a rock from our yard to smash his window. A rainbow flag was ripped off our fence. Our solar yard lights were stolen. A neighbor(s?) filed anonymous complaints about us to the city codes department (3 so far). Day after day, there were angry letters in our mailbox, without return addresses, signed “your neighbors.”
My mom (who lives with us) took it the hardest. Her military career, as one of the Women’s Army Corp during their integration into the Regular Army in the late 1970s, was filled with sexual harassment and trauma. As a military investigator, she spent her career in the trenches of sexual assault, violence, and domestic abuse. The hate mail opened old wounds. Her PTSD symptoms increased, panic attacks surged, and she was afraid to be alone outside. She had wanted to nurture a garden, but our yard suddenly felt like another battlefield.
I was racked with guilt that I failed to build my family a safe space in the home we chose. I’ve been teaching yoga since I was 19. Sometimes, I teach by sharing how I use mindfulness to manage my own stress. Our story went viral. You can read the coverage in the Lawrence (Kansas) Times here (https://lawrencekstimes.com/2023/04/26/family-disheartened-neighbors-letters/) and here (https://lawrencekstimes.com/2023/05/05/bonuras-flooded-with-lawrence-love/).
In response, we found ourselves showered with love. The postal worker brought letters and cards from across Lawrence, across Kansas, across the US. I got emails and messages from as far away as Qatar and Nepal. People rang our doorbell to hand deliver potted purple plants, cut flowers, and original art. People hugged my mom and told my kids we were welcome. Several people offered to just sit with my mom, in the garden (with their dogs for added protection), until she felt safe again.
With all the love, plus good therapists (which I mention, because I think we need to break down stigmas and talk openly about mental health), we began to heal. My mom is back outside. She plants, weeds, waters, feeds her critters, waves at walkers, and talks to every person who stops (and on her therapist’s advice, tries not to take it personally when some of the neighbors still don’t acknowledge her).
As artists, we often work through our sorrow and find our healing in art. I turned to the physical art form of mixed-media collage, so that I could physically and concretely process my emotions. I handled every single letter and gift, as well as hundreds of photographs I took during the journey. I chose to shred the hate letters as a tangible act of letting go. I carefully preserved the love letters and gift cards. I turned the spirit of it all into a collage that I presented to my mom for Mother’s Day 2024. “My Mother’s Garden” hangs on her bedroom wall; she says it makes her smile every morning.
Photo of my finished collage, titled “My Mother’s Garden.”
The world is both good and bad.
Kindness and cruelty co-exist.
We will feel loved, and we will have our hearts broken.
We must choose: how do we want to live?
I choose to treat my life as a garden.
Pain can be compost, if we process it to enrich the soil. We must do the work of planting seeds of hope. We must do the work of weeding out resentment and thoughts of revenge, which are harmful to our hearts. When we are open about our pain, we give others space to help us heal. Kind people shower love like rain. We can share joy and beauty with others, through the flowers we grow.
Just like the flowers now blooming in my mother’s garden.
My mom, happy in her garden again, surrounded by her blooms.
ABOUT THE WORK
My Mother's Garden, Mixed-Media Collage on Canvas, 36 x 48, 2024, NOT FOR SALE
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to the members of the Lawrence, Kansas community (both within Lawrence, and around the world, and particularly the amazing people of “Live Love Local Lawrence” on Facebook, who organized a card shower) for: 176 cards and letters via the mail (plus over 1,000 digital notes, emails, and messages of support), 28 living plants, 6 bouquets of cut flowers, 4 copies of the children’s book The Big Orange Splot (by Daniel Pinkwater), 8 pieces of original art, 3 gift cards for local Lawrence stores, 2 gift bags full of presents for my kids, plus lots and lots of stickers, an overflow of love, and over 800 pounds of food collected and donated to the Lawrence Kansas Just Foods foodbank.
Thanks to the following artists for granting permission to include images of their art in this collage:
Hyacinths, by Lisa Cloar
Purple Sky, by Deb Cole
Purple House, by Zoe Evans & Sidney Edelbrock
Rainbow Strings of Lawrence, by Sara Childers Gillum
Purple Flower, by Elijah Gorman
Just Breathe photo card, by Klein Weckman photography
Kindness Just Because, In Memory of James Lynch, by Kara Lynch
Thanks to the following individuals for granting permission to include their images in this collage:
Sandra Bethany (AKA My mom)
Kid #1 and Kid #2 (AKA My kids)
Eric Bloom
Trevor Potty (with foster dog Charlene)
Chanda Rojas (photo courtesy of Chanda Rojas)