Growing up as a military kid, my family never went on vacations. I don’t have photographs of cruises, camping, hotel pools, sightseeing or the beach. I have yet to visit our national parks or Disneyland. 

Instead, I have memories of time spent with my grandparents. No matter where we were stationed, we spent my father’s leave in a place my parents called home: Nesquehoning, Pa.  My parents, both second generation Americans, grew up as blue-collar kids in Nesquehoning, a one-stop light coal-mining town wedged between the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania.

Every summer we’d strap down our Ford Pinto station wagon with enough stuff to resemble a Grapes of Wrath voyage and head across country to Nesquehoning.
If we couldn’t get “home” my grandparents came to us. At the age of 61, my Nan-Nan took her first airplane ride to visit with us in Germany.   

Throughout our lives, grandparents are the links to our childhood and heritage. It’s a priceless relationship for all children, especially military brats, whose sense of grounding, place, and belonging can be uncertain.

It always saddened my mother, a school nurse on post, to hear military teens complain about an upcoming visit from their grandparents. “I don’t even know them,” they’d tell her.
 
My parents decided early in their military marriage their children would have a close relationship with their grandparents, regardless of whether we were separated by land, sea or time zones. My parents grew up in homes where the nuclear family included grandparents.

We made the most of our once, sometimes twice, a year visits. In Nesquehoning, my Nan-Nan, who was of Czechoslovakian decent, tied a babushka under my chin and off we went, navigating the crooked sidewalks lining the streets downtown. We’d sit in the back pew of a church and watch a wedding ceremony we weren’t invited to. Next, we checked on my grandmother’s ham order at Bobby the butcher’s. Before heading home we’d stop by the Russian-Orthodox church bazaar to buy boxes of freshly made perogies, which always went well with my grandmother’s homemade huckleberry pie. Later, I’d go to New Columbus, the Italian side of town, where my father grew up. I used to help my Pop-Pop hunt Japanese beetles preying on the petals of his rose bushes. We’d stop along the way and admire his tomato and green pepper plants. Though she wasn’t Italian like her husband, my Ba-Ba (the Eastern European name for grandmother) sure cooked like one.   

My grandmothers always cried when we left. In their town adult children and grandchildren lived around the corner or “up the back.” Holidays and every day were always spent together.   

Today, my family only has gravesites to visit in Nesquehoning. I’m thankful to my parents, who through thirty years of nomadic Army living made sure their girls knew the meaning of family.    

In a few months, I’ll give birth to my first child, who like me, will also be an Army brat. I’ve thought a lot about my grandparents and the relationship I hope my little boy has with his grandparents.

After all, children can never have too many people who love them.