Her Name Was Margaret

I'm in my early 20s, ten months married, and deployed on a humanitarian mission in South America. My wife is 3,000 miles from everyone she's ever known, flying alone into a city she has never seen in her life: Norfolk, Virginia.

She'd just put in her notice at a job she'd held for many years, to follow a sailor she'd been married to for ten months to a place neither of us could have found on a map two years earlier.

She had to find us a home. By herself. While I sat on a ship with no way to really help.

A real estate agent she had never met drove her around this city for days until they found a little ranch house we could actually afford.

No commission. Not a fancy listing. A young military wife with no money, no local family and a husband at sea.

That agent took care of her with kindness and compassion. I came home that December and walked into the first home of our married life. My mother-in-law had it completely set up. It was warm. It was our first journey. I'd never seen it before, but it already felt like home.

The name

For fifteen years, I could not remember that agent's name. Working on writing my story down, it finally came back to me.

Her name was Margaret.

Margaret, I don't know if you're still in the business. I don't know if you'll ever see this.

But you drove a young military spouse around Norfolk in 2010 like she mattered, and the couple you did that for never forgot it. I became a Realtor partly because of what you did for mine. Every person I've ever handed keys to, you're in that story as well.

Everybody's got a Margaret. Most of them never got told.

Share this one for me. Norfolk's a small city in a big way. Fifteen years is a long time. But stranger things have happened.