THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, December 22, 1995 TAG: 9512210158
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Over Easy
SOURCE: Jo-Ann Clegg
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
This column first appeared in The Beacon 10 years ago today. I offer it again in memory of the Christmas, 50 years ago now, when the war was finally over and the boys (as we called them then) came home.
Even though I have come to love the white pine ropes and della Robbias of Virginia, nothing stirs the memory of holidays past like a fir wreath trimmed with red bows and pine cones of my native state of Maine.
Those wreaths seem to absorb not only the scents of the woods where they grew, but also the essence of the kitchens where solid country women with calloused fingers worked at oil-cloth covered tables to earn their Christmas shopping money.
The scent of fish chowder simmering on the back of a wood stove is in those wreaths. So are the aromas of pies - native blueberry and mince-meat (the real kind, made from last year's kill) - and of snow-covered wool jackets hung to air.
The wreaths bring back many memories of Christmases past. None are more vivid than those from 1945, the holiday when my cousin, Austin, came home from World War II.
He was one of my Aunt Galdy's three sons who had served overseas and the only one not yet home. He and his brothers had followed in a family tradition that began not long after his ancestors, heading for Philadelphia in the mid-1700s, had found themselves hard aground on the coast of Maine instead. They claimed the rocky soil for their own and proceeded to fish and farm for generations to come.
Through the years, the family sent its sons to each of our country's wars. Always the young men returned to marry local girls and earn a living from the land and sea as best they could.
Austin was 17 when he enlisted in 1943, a fresh-faced kid with the dark hair and eyes of his Welsh forefathers and a newly grown lobsterman's beard.
For two years, he had served his country in the South Pacific, fighting through jungle growth as different from the woods of Maine as Austin was from Japan's equally young foot soldiers.
Since the day the war ended, the family had been listening to each news broadcast, hoping to hear the word that his unit had been deactivated.
A few days before Christmas, Aunt Gladys arrived at our house for the holidays, bringing her younger children with her. It seemed clear that Austin would not be joining them.
My cousin, Charline, and I were still asleep on the living room couch the morning of Christmas Eve when the snow-covered figure walked through the sliding doors from the front hall.
I looked up and saw a stooped old man with a beard wearing an army coat. Charline saw something else. She leaped over me and threw herself into the old man's arms.
``Austin!'' she shrieked as she brushed the melting snow off his shoulders.
I edged self-consciously past their reunion to close the heavy front door with the fir wreath hanging on it.
I was almost 10 years old that Christmas, and I thought that I knew all there was to know about war. I had been following one on the radio, in the newspapers and in the movies for almost half of my life.
But that holiday season taught me one more thing. It taught me that war turned young men like the Austin I remembered into old men like the one at the door.
I saw that even more clearly the next day after Christmas dinner when we wrapped Austin in blankets to ward off the chills of a malaria attack. Later, when Dr. Emery, himself a South Pacific veteran, came to tend to Austin I saw the same look in the eyes of both my 19-year-old cousin and the young doctor.
They were the eyes of men who had seen things that each must have prayed the rest of us would be spared.
Austin went home after Christmas and followed in the footsteps of his ancestors who served their country, saw the world and found it wanting. For 40 years, he has hauled lobster traps and cut wood to make a sparse living for his family of 10.
He saw his brothers and sons go off to fight in other wars. His unspoken wishes that they be spared what he had known went unanswered.
To this day, the scent of freshly cut fir boughs reminds me of Austin and that special Christmas. When I close my eyes, I see a young man suddenly turned old. Standing in front of a homemade wreath, he's wearing a snow-covered Army coat and holding his pajama-clad young sister in his arms.
It's a picture that gives a very special meaning to the words: ``Peace on earth, good will to men.''
Last fall, I visited with Austin. Leona, his beloved wife of nearly 50 years, had passed away a few months earlier. He lives now with his daughter and her family, still fishes from time to time and cuts a little wood. His body is older but his eyes, the pain of war having dimmed with time, seem somehow younger than they did on that Christmas Eve 50 years ago. by CNB