On Sunday, families all over Georgia will celebrate Mother’s Day, taking moms out to brunch and buying presents. Others, whose mothers are no longer with them, will sift through memories. The mother of Salvation South magazine editor Chuck Reece died when he was just 11 years old. His memories of her were scant — until recently, when he found some hidden treasures.

Salvation South

Transcript

Chuck Reece: A little thing can open a big door in your memory, like a smell on a spring morning or a scrap of handwriting, or maybe a few lines from a letter you were never meant to read.

Last fall, at a funeral, a cousin brought me a blue plastic storage bin. Inside it were two shoe boxes packed tight with letters between my mother and father, written in 1944 and 1945. Letters my father wrote to my mother after he was drafted in early '44, and a thick stack of her letters to him, which he somehow managed to keep intact and bring home from World War II. My father never told me about these letters. My cousin found them among his things.

On my desk right now are two of them, addressed in my mother's neat cursive to Private First Class Clarence Reece. One is dated three days after her 22nd birthday in February of 1944, while my father was still in basic training at Fort Benning. She writes about buying material for living room curtains, blue and white, so they'll match the rug that she's moved into that room. And then, in a mix of decor and desire that only a 22-year-old newlywed in the 1940s could pull off, my mother writes, "I sure would love to love you up some in our living room. Boy, oh boy, wouldn't that be swell."

In another letter, 16 months later in June 1945, she is at her sister's house, sweating through a hot Saturday evening while nieces and nephews run wild around her. She complains about kids who don't mind their parents and concludes, "Honey, I'll hush for now, for I haven't any news and these kids sound like a tornado."

Before I opened those shoe boxes, my memories of my mother felt thin. She died when I was only 11. But now, I see a version of my mother I never knew. She is young and very much in love, and furious at the distance that keeps her husband thousands of miles away in a war he can't control. So she does the only thing she can do. She writes. She fills page after page with the ordinary details of her days, curtains and rugs, nieces and nephews, the weather, her worries. 

She closes every letter the same way. "Your devoted loving wife, Flora."

I arrived late in my mother’s short life. I never knew her as she was in those war years. I can no longer buy her a Mother’s Day gift. This year, she has given me a Mother’s Day present — her folded letters from an old shoebox.

I'm Chuck Reece. On Sunday, you can read more about my mama’s letters at salvationsouth.com