Letters from Home

It’s odd, isn’t it? People die every day and the world goes on like nothing happened. But when it’s a person you love, you think everyone should stop and take notice. That they ought to cry and light candles and tell you that you’re not alone.

Life is too short not to say how you feel to the people you love.

Home. It's such a simple word, one I never knew would come to mean as much to me as it has. It once was my dad's house, then my uncle's farm. Mostly it's meant wherever Charlie and I were together. Now, though, it's you. It's your letters, your words. They're the place I go to with my fears, where I find comfort, where I feel safe.

Were prayers of murderers, when fighting on the “right side” of the war, ever heard—let alone answered?

When I was a kid, my mom once told me that God was an artist and how on occasion He’d throw a bucketful of paint across the sky for us all to see. I asked her why the paint disappeared by morning, and she told me that if the sky was always like that we might take it for granted. I suppose she was right. Maybe that’s what war is all about—so we can appreciate times of peace.

But there was something else. A feeling of understanding, a comfort that defied reason. It was as though kissing her, a near stranger, would have made all the sense in the world.

Finally, a period of healing began for those who had lost so much. Veterans everywhere, no matter the color of their uniform or skin, licked their wounds and headed for home. Prisoners of Japanese internment camps and Jewish concentration camps alike lamented their stolen lives. And broken families around the globe mourned the loss of a generation of young men: boys who became men through valor but whose hair would never go gray; soldiers who would never bask in the glory of a victory parade, never smell the warm, milky breath of their newborn babies; sailors who would never turn their sweethearts into brides.

For a powerful truth had come to her: Before she could spring into her future, she needed to smooth over the bumps of her past.