Comiso Air Station, Sicily

This is a Google satellite picture with the arrow pointing to my old townhouse apartment.  It was one of the nicer homes I've lived in, and certainly the best military housing I ever had.

That runway in the picture was not active at the time I lived there and we crossed it to get from the main part of the tiny base to the housing area.

This is a video with awesome still photos that were taken about 17 years after the base closed (so the pictures are recent).  I left shortly before the final base closure.  It's interesting to see what happens when "nature" is allowed to take over.  I didn't see my own street housing, but my apartment was very similar to the ones in the video.  I did have to take a close look at a picture of an overgrown bougainvillea, because it was in the same relative location as one at the front of my apartment.

I was delighted and thrilled to get the assignment to Sicily.  I had never lived overseas and who wouldn't want to move to a Mediterranean island?  The base was closing at the time I arrived, and Iraq had just invaded Kuwait.  There was a lot of tension and a lot of the military members on the base were gone to Desert Storm.  But . . . it was still a Mediterranean island with thousands of years of history right out the back fence.

It was one of my favorite places I've ever lived.

A strange, strange experience

Dh was visiting my parents a week or two ago and brought home a video for me. I made it around Christmas/New Year 1990-1991 at Comiso Air Station, Sicily, Italy and sent it to my parents so they could see my children, my townhouse, and a few things in town. I hadn't seen it since I sent it to them, so 18+ years.

On it I saw a friend I very recently reconnected with via Facebook, along with her two tiny children who are now in college. I saw how I looked with chiseled facial structure vs. the soft and saggy face I have now. I saw myself with a 25" waist. Won't even tell you what it is now. I saw my now-married son when he was still having minor speech articulation problems due to being only 4 years old. I saw my dd who is a mother now as a baby who gallumped across the floor because she didn't yet crawl. I took a tour of my old townhouse that was virtually identical to my memory of it.

Ds2 was not even imagined at that point and certainly none of the other life-changing events that came after that. It's easy to say, oh, those were the good old days, when I was so young and my children were so sweet, but to tell the truth, my life is a lot more complicated now than it was then, but it is ever so much happier.