By the time you read this…
Winter will be done and sunnier days will push out the lingering cold. The town will be a-buzz with the spring festival and all those lost in battle will be but a striving memory against the rush of liveliness everyone so desperately needs.
The sunset curfew will be lifted and evenings in Wallerfield will return to its old homely state with dinner guests tipping hats at each other as they cross paths on the streets. Mr. Baker will reopen his restaurant and everyone will once again queue up for his savoury pies. Mrs. Baker will have given birth to her 3rd child, hopefully the boy they so desperately want, to bring honour and lineage to the family name.
By the time you read this…
Ivy will be done with her piano lessons and looking forward to her cotillion. She’s spoken of nothing else since Christmas and is driving everyone wild with her ravings. Mrs. Dahlstrom will be busy with extra sewing and odd jobs to pay for this cotillion. Her sewing machine already blares at us past dusk. At least they’ll both be too consumed to grieve lieutenant Dahlstrom’s death. Oh I sure hope so..
Genevieve will be a married women, her ceremony is in a fortnight. Now she can forever taunt me with having been married off before me. Everything’s a competition until she’s not winning, then we’re the best of sisters.
I will have bested my sister at the one thing I wouldn’t have wanted to. I hope it’s a boy. But perhaps a bastard son is no better off than a bastard daughter. Grandmother suspects and I think she pities me. But her pity is wasted. Soon you’ll be home and we’ll be wed. Then you can recite all of your war stories to little Bean. How heroic you are!!!
My dear, by the time you read this….
I hope you can do just that. I pray you are safe and can come home to me. I have nowhere to send this letter except to the top of the pile of others I’ve been writing. I miss you so, and cannot justify our love child without reassurance of your return. I will have to face my father. And I just know my mother will die from the gossip.
Please come home!
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