Dakota Beacon

Of all seasons, autumn I love best. Time advances beyond the heat of summer to the cool evenings of fall before eventually morphing to the bleak days of winter. The third quarter of the year offers an opportunity to reflect on events gone by.

A different autumn arrives in due time – the autumn of our life. By then many have reached their zenith and have retired or contemplate doing so. Such an occasion offers a period to reminisce on decades past including the good, the bad, and the mediocre. Photo albums, diaries, and chats with adult children bring back memories long forgotten. A more poignant and truthful recall comes with the written word. Letters collected over the years capture these memories. In the case of my wife Jan and me, dozens of letters, maybe hundreds of letters, resurrect long forgotten details of our past. Not only do they recall events, they also give insight into the shared feelings, thoughts, and attitudes of writer and recipient.

Over the past month we sorted through and organized a few book-boxes of letters. Letters from parents, letters to parents, letters between us when we first met, letters pre-dating our friendship, letters after marriage, letters between us from Korea and Vietnam – on and on.

It seemed best to organize the letters by date. That would automatically categorize them by era. Categories generally included pre-high school and high school years, Yellowstone Park and pre-marriage years, Korea, Viet Nam, Germany, and later years.

For me, the earliest correspondence included letters my father wrote on my behalf involving a youthful indiscretion at age 11. I almost put out the eye of another boy when shooting at each other with slingshots. The letters built my father’s legal defense should we need it. Thankfully, we didn’t.

In Jan’s case, she and her folks saved letters written between them during Jan’s high school years. Her folks lived on an isolated ranch in North Dakota where winters precluded daily travel between home and school. Solution? Jan stayed with her aunt and uncle in Austin, Texas where she attended high school and returned home by bus for the summers. Following graduation she gained seasonal employment in Yellowstone Park.

This initiated a trove of letters starting in 1960 telling of her work and tales of hiking and fishing during time off. As an active farm kid, she was out and about in the forests and mountains of the Park while the city girls stayed back and goofed around the bunkhouse. It was her second summer in the Park when a new employee struck her fancy. Me. That was 1961. Not only do we have her correspondence with her parents, but we saved most of the letters she and I exchanged through our on-again off-again relationship. That culminated in 1964 when we married.

Next came the era of separations with all the correspondence. After college we were committed to being a professional Army household. Infantry schools and training imposed separation followed immediately by a 13-month assignment to the Korean DMZ. We have almost all of our letters from my Korean tour. One year back in the States incurred another separation. I was off to Vietnam commanding a rifle company with the 101^st Airborne Division. We preserved as many of our letters as possible. But it was not possible for me to carry in my rucksack in the field the numerous letters Jan wrote. However, she did preserved the ones I wrote to her.

The final three volumes contain letters Jan wrote to her parents from 1973 to 1993. They comprise recollections of the early and teen years of our kids, travels through various military assignments, and the culmination of our military career together.

Re-reading and then collecting the letters into volumes gives a sense of our mortality. Better still, they apprehend the reveries of our hearts.

Outside of the immediate family, the fifteen volumes of letters would be of little interest except maybe to a voyeur. We could believe that someday our grandkids or their kids might kindle an interest in the family’s history. In that case, the organized volumes of letters would prove valuable.

On the other hand, if the fifteen volumes of letters are of interest to no one, then they will probably be disposed of by someone. If that be so, then the record of our lives well-lived will be scattered as dust on the wind. As it is said of us when we are gone, “…for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). And with our passing will go the story of our lives on earth. Even so, we have assurance we will live on in another Realm with Someone who does care.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).