Safer at Home
I have not worked on personal projects much during this
season of safer-at-home. Between making masks for family, friends, and neighbors
and the working-at-home that I manage, not to mention the regular chores,
there hasn't been much time or energy left for indulging in non-essential
activities.
A passing YouTube video captured my attention a few weeks
ago and I have squeezed in time to piece a new quilt top, something cozy and
easy. It's the Easy Carpenter's Star from Missouri Star Quilt Company.
Another project resurfaced this afternoon.
It's been a few years since I picked up any of my
grandfather's war-time letters to transcribe for the digital age. He suffered
more than one stroke in his life by the time I was born. Because of the
debilitations they brought, I never got to really see his true nature before he
passed. These letters reveal his personality as a young man in a time of two major
world events - the Great War and the Spanish flu. As I transfer the words from
his hand to my keyboard, I am struck by the window I am peering through - to
another time and place, to family on the threshold of the unknown, to a
connection more than a century old. Born in 1889, he is a dentist, graduated
from Vanderbilt in May 1914. My house was built in 1914.
The letters are out of sequence in my shoebox, so I have
previously gotten to Armistice Day before he even arrives for basic training at
Camp Pike in Arkansas
To see from his own letters, much less from history,
what he does not yet know as he writes about the mundane aspects of settling into
camp life is like reading a book whose ending is already known. His reports about vaccinations (for typhoid) and quarantine sound all too familiar. He talks
about seeing friends from home and Saturdays on the town in Little
Rock
As I work my way through these letters, what will I find in common with this man, this man who was
gone before I was old enough to really engage? How much of myself will I see?
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