Old Love Letters and their Memories

Published by admin under Reading Memories, Simple Pleasures on January 16, 2009

I’ve mentioned this in a few other spots on the web, but this week, I sorted through a beautiful pile of World War II mail, letters written by a man to his wife every 2-3 days from overseas during 1943-1944.  He writes from the time he leaves, to…well, I haven’t read that far yet.  There are over 100 letters, so I’m looking forward to reading for a long time to come.

I have read through the first 2 months, and this man knew how to put words together so that you sensed the love he had for his wife, and he wrote in a way that made it possible to live his experiences through your imagination as he wrote them.  You could sense that he wanted his wife to be experiencing what he was experiencing, and did the best he could with censorship being what it was at that time…every letter was read by and marked “censored”, and sometimes by whom.

As I read, I wondered if writing letters like this is still done…do our guys overseas long for letters as much as this man longed to receive mail, do they write home with the same passion?  What about the ones that don’t have someone special in their lives, are they receiving mail?  Or is it all done by email now?

There is something so personal about a hand written letter…if you love the person that wrote it, you know you are touching the same paper that their hand has touched, it is the closest thing to having something that they held recently in your hands when you can’t have that person to embrace.

I’m getting off track…like a good novel, and a very romantic one at that, I’m enjoying real stories, written by a real person, who really loved his wife back home, longed to be with her, longed to hear from her, missed her terribly, and would be apart from her longer than he expected.