I should be finishing the SF novel I’ve been working on (and off) for the better part of four years now. Instead, I’ve found myself obsessed with letters recently found in my dearly departed mother‘s possessions…letters written from my grandmother’s first husband, John Hart, while he was in the US Army in the 1940s.
He died. This ain’t no story of heroic sacrifice or rah-rah patriotism. This is reality.
We have only a few photos of him. Lots of my grandfather. And tons of anecdotal evidence and stories passed down during the past six decades.
Friends before the war. Married during it. Widowed then married again. Families torn apart, feeling betrayed and publicly feuding at funerals.
I can only imagine the conflicting, wrenching emotions they must all have felt. And how that affected my mother, and then my siblings and me.
An unconventional love story? A history lesson? An examination of intercultural / intergenerational / international conflict?
Maybe yes to all the above. Think I’ll give it a go.
