But mostly, he wrote about his family’s farm. He told me about the old oak tree by the creek and how the tobacco leaves smelled when they were curing in the barn.
I don’t even know why I remember this part, but he once sent me a dried oak leaf tucked inside an envelope. It was crushed to dust by the time it reached Illinois, but I kept the tiny brown fragments in the bottom of that blue tin box anyway. I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world.
Then, in November of 1971, the letters simply stopped. I wrote three more times. I bought the special airmail envelopes with the red and blue borders. I sat at my desk until my fingers were cramped, asking him if he was alright, if he was coming home soon.
Nothing came back. There was no return-to-sender stamp. There was just a flat, empty silence that settled over our mailbox. Every afternoon at three, I would stand by the front window, waiting for the mail truck to pull up. The postmaster, Mr. Gentry, knew what I was looking for. After a few weeks, he would just shake his head before I even walked through the door of the post office.
I was terrified. Back then, you didn’t have cell phones or internet. You couldn’t just look someone up. If a soldier stopped writing, you assumed the worst. I spent three months scanning the daily newspapers, my eyes burning as I read through the casualty lists, terrified I would see his name.
By the spring of 1972, I was hollowed out. I stopped looking at the mail truck. I put the blue tin box at the very bottom of my cedar chest, underneath my winter blankets. I decided that Eddie was gone, and that I had to find a way to live with that quiet ache.
I met Kenneth a year later at a church social in DeKalb. He was a quiet, solid man who worked at the local grain elevator. He wore clean denim shirts and spoke only when he had something necessary to say. He was safe. He was alive. When Kenneth asked me to marry him on the porch of his parents’ house, I said yes. I loved him, but it was a different kind of love. It was steady. It didn’t keep me awake at night.
Fifty years passed like a train clicking along the tracks. We had Sarah, then David, and finally little Kenny. We bought the ranch house on Maple Street. We put a tire swing in the oak tree in the backyard. My life was full of laundry, school lunches, and Friday night fish fries. But every now and then, when the autumn rain hit the windows in a certain way, my mind would slip back to the red clay of Kentucky.
Kenneth retired from the grain elevator in 2010. His joints were stiff from the cold winters, and he spent his afternoons watching the Cubs on television.
He was a good husband. He never raised his voice, and he always held the door for me when we went to Meijer. But we were like two old trees planted close together. Our roots were tangled, but we didn’t really touch anymore.
When Kenneth’s heart finally gave out last autumn while he was sitting in his recliner, I didn’t scream or cry. I just stood there in the living room, staring at him, because my brain genuinely stopped working for a second. I called the ambulance, but I knew he was already gone. After the funeral, the house became a tomb. The kids came and went, offering to help me pack up his things, but I told them I wanted to do it myself.
That brings me back to this morning. I had spent three days in the attic and the garage, sorting through fifty years of Kenneth’s life. I found his old army duffel bag tucked behind some cardboard boxes of holiday decorations. The green canvas was stiff and stained with grease. It took me ten minutes with a pair of rusty pliers to get the brass zipper to budge.
Inside were his uniforms from Munich. They were perfectly preserved, still holding the faint scent of the laundry soap they used on the base in 1968. I decided to take them to the VFW Post 2245. It was a rainy Tuesday morning, the sky the color of a wet slate. I drove slowly, my windshield wipers squeaking against the glass.
When I walked into the post, the smell of stale coffee and floor wax hit me immediately. Art was sitting behind the laminate counter, reading a newspaper. I signed the donation slip with my old, shaky handwriting.
I don’t even know why, but instead of writing Clara Henderson, I wrote Clara Briggs. Maybe because those uniforms belonged to a different era.