SO THIS WAS THE LAST OF IT – a sorry-looking box, way on the other side of the long, hot, cramped attic floor and I thought, ”Ugh! I’m just leaving it. I’m too exhausted.”
It was the end of everything. My mother had just passed away after seven difficult years of going. And this was the final retrieve from what had been a whole house full of things, from what had been a life – actually, an entire family’s life ... our life.
But as I started back down the wobbly ladder steps to the hallway, I stopped for a moment and thought about it. Just one more lonely cardboard box. I really should go get it.
So I climbed back up the ladder and crawled on my hands and knees across the length of the house to the box, which now seemed like a grail, illuminated by a small window along the wall. Sweat was dripping from my face onto a thick layer of dust as I pulled the flaps open and looked inside.
THE BOX WAS FILLED with letters. Nearly a hundred of them. In tiny envelopes. Envelopes like I had never seen before. It wasn’t until I opened the first one that I realized it was V-Mail from WWII, correspondence from my father to my mother, written during downtime between battles. Greetings from England, North Africa, Italy. Places my mother would never see and my dad would never set foot in again.
The letters did not speak of war because of military censorship rules. They could have been written from Peoria in summer, instead of Paris following the Normandy invasion.
Topics centered mostly on tardy mail, how pretty my mom looked in the last batch of snapshots she sent, or how yet another package of goodies arrived crushed and useless. It was only in the closing line that you could sense something more intimate was happening.
The first few letters ended with, “Your Friend, Frank.” Then they moved to, “Love, Frank.” And finally, “Love and Kisses, Frank,” which is how dad signed his cards to mom forevermore.
The box contained the entirety of my parents' courtship.
When dad went off to war, he knew my mom only as his sister's best friend. The letter-writing began merely as a morale-booster. It ended as a three-year-long Valentine.
My father returned home to Philadelphia on Aug. 4, 1945.
The first thing he did that day was propose to the woman he had been writing to for so long, even though they had never been on a date.
Today, August 4th, was treated as a holiday when I was growing up. Mom always prepared a special meal to celebrate dad's homecoming: gnocchi, veal Milanese, and a yummy dessert made from scratch.
IT IS IMPORTANT to understand why we write things down.
Not for money. Not for notoriety. Though if they come along, good on you.
We write for memory.
When everything is gone, like my parents’ house and all that was in it – like my house and your house, gone, too, one day – the words remain.
Be they on microfilm, paper, iphone, computer, in a binder, book, blog, diary, or sitting in an old dusty cardboard box, they will testify that we were here.
That something extraordinary happened here, in all its wild complexity.
This gift we call life.
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