After the war things will be different

Yes, after graduation from college things are going to be different.

When Grandma Abigail passed in June 1982, the sorting, cleaning, and emptying of her house had been overwhelming. So much to sift through, so many decisions, piles of letters, documents and photographs. Sally, her only daughter, didn’t want to save much, but on the day before the removers were to come she decided to take one last look through the stacks of boxes and bags of garbage. The chaos was now ordered, or so she thought. She glanced at the notes she had taped and pinned here and there to let whomever was to come know where to deliver things – “to the Salvation Army”, “to our house”, “to household waste management”, “to the recycling center”. She packed boxes for her two sons, and put aside a couple of mementos and a few pieces of furniture for herself.

Sensing that she had done as much as she could, she sat down on her mother’s bulky armchair, sinking into the seat that had long since lost its bounce, having given in to the weight of her mother’s body, once and for all. The upholstered arm rests were also well worn, evidence of the loyal support they had given her mother on so many occasions, especially when she had to get quickly back onto her feet. They were the levers that had helped to heave her heavy body to an upright position so that she could move on to her chores.

Sally wasn’t ready to get up yet though. She leaned back and surveyed the room, breathing a sigh of relief over a job well done, and let her eyes wander along the empty spaces and through the passageways between boxes and furniture.There were all those pieces of clothing she thought might be of value, to anyone, that she had brought out of the closets and hung on the curtain rod in the light of the bay window earlier in the week. She could clearly see the note she had pinned to the woolen overcoat, hanging in front of this open wardrobe. She knew that the message read that everything hanging in this window, with the exception of one dress, was for the Salvation Army pick-up. Waiting for a feverish flush to subside, she recalled the note that she had attached to that one dress: “To be left behind”. Though she couldn’t see that note just now, she was quite sure that it was still there, pinned to the front of an elegant bone-white gown with a full-length skirt that fell far below the hems of all the other clothing hanging in the window.

She was looking at that gown now, the one she had worn on her first wedding day in June 1942, when she had married her college love. Were they crazy? They had set the date. They were to be married just two weeks after her graduation from Stanford and a month after Tom’s return from service as a Royal Air Force pilot. He had enlisted after his own graduation from Stanford in 1940, just six months before the US had entered the war. Would Tom soon be returning to the front, or stay for good? Would things be different now that she had graduated and could work too? The questions were there, but on that day they had put them aside to celebrate. Love, hope and charity.