Love Letters

Outside my window a huge sheet of ice is floating by on the Mississippi River. The ice up in the backwaters is breaking loose. Eagles are playing in the air currents and cruising the treetops of the island across from us. They're also keeping a close eye on the commercial fishermen who are setting a net across this back channel to harvest carp. In the front yard, the birdsong and squirrel chatter is gloriously loud and joyful. The sedum and daylilies are waking up, and I expect the lungwort to break through a crust of matted leaves any day now. I really should get the trimmers out and hack down the remains of my roadside garden. 

Yesterday I received the first shot of vaccine, and I found myself dancing around the house. The dogs aren't sure what to make of me. 

It's time for a new beginning. I've put my sequel to Guardians of Grace on hold and started a new project. It all began when I decided to go through the letters my mother saved in a shoebox for more than sixty years—the love letters my father wrote to her when he was still in the Virginia Military Institute and she was 400 miles away in Dayton, Ohio. I also found a big envelope full of memorabilia from her time training for the Cadet Nurse Corps at Good Samaritan Hospital in Dayton, OH. In that period, 1945 to 1951, with the war finally ended, the future seemed bright and hopeful for a young couple and a nation. I want to capture that story. 

Because of the war, so many nurses were recruited into the Army or Navy that the civilian hospitals were in dire straits. This situation was made worse because physicians were entering military service, leaving nurses to take over more responsibilities for heath care on the home front. And as cities of industrial workers sprang up overnight to support the war effort, public health nurses were badly needed. Meanwhile, military hospitals were filling with wounded. In 1943, Congress passed a bill to provide for the training of nurses for the armed forces, governmental and civilian hospitals, health agencies and war industries. And thus was born the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps.

Schools of nursing were eligible if they agreed to accelerate their programs to 30 months, followed by a 6-month residency for each senior cadet in her home hospital, a state or federal hospital, or other public health service facility. Between July 1943 and October 1945, 179,000 young women joined the Corps and 124,000 graduated by the end of the program in 1948. (Women already in the program were allowed to finish after the war ended. My mother was in the last class.) 

Like my mother, girls were recruited out of high school enticed by free education, the chance to serve their country in uniform (they were pretty snazzy uniforms), and the opportunity for a lifetime career. For a girl in small town Ohio with limited prospects, this was irresistible. 

She met my father two years after graduation, when he was a senior cadet at the Virginia Military Institute, but attending a summer camp at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. He started writing letters to her as soon as he returned to Lexington, Virginia for his last year. When he graduated with a civil engineering degree, he received a commission into the Air Force, reporting to Edwards Air Force Base in California. The letters ended when he was able to get back to Dayton in November— just long enough to marry my mother, buy a car, and drive back to California together.  

I am thoroughly enjoying the research for this project. The book will be historical fiction, allowing me to play around with the plot and the characters to tell a story of hope.  It feels right at a time when I'm feeling pretty hopeful after surviving 2020 and the pandemic.