It’s funny how this answer changes with time. The older I get, the more time I spend thinking about the past. The things that connect me to that past are more and more dear with the passage of time.
I grew up in a time when people still wrote letters and sent them through the U.S. Mail. At 18 I joined the Navy (much to my father’s chagrin, and my mother’s envy). The letters my dad wrote to me as I traveled around the country and overseas meant more than I can say, and I still have them. One of my older sisters was insanely jealous when she found out Dad was writing to me, because in all the years she had been gone from home he had never written to her. But Dad served in the Army, and he knew how much those letters from home meant. There was nothing momentous in those letters, usually just a short page or two telling me about his day at work. When I first told him I wanted to enlist, his response had been, “That’s no life for a woman!” and he almost didn’t sign the papers. Ultimately as time went on and he saw me thriving in a military vastly different from the one he’d known in World War 2, he told me how proud he was of me. It created a bond between us that he’d never had with any of my four sisters.
So maybe it’s more than the letters; maybe it’s the memories I treasure the most.
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