A Drabble A Day

I have so many letters saved from my brother from back then, when he was in Vietnam. He was there from when I was eleven to about fourteen, so the memories are little hazy. But I remember those letters.

They were in boxes in my bedroom closet, in plastic sleeves keeping them safe. Sometimes I’d read through them when I felt nostalgic, and I always brought some of the more informational ones to school during the Vietnam unit. The kids always loved it.

I left the more emotional ones at home, the ones that would make me cry most days, detailing the friendships he had formed and lost, the people he had killed himself, other worse things he’d seen. I didn’t like to reread those ones very much, but I still remembered them. Every word.

That was about forty years ago, a fact I didn’t like remembering, as it reminded me of my age.

But the first time I read them I wasn’t sixty two, a freshman American government teacher with a husband and two full grown children, twenty five and thirty years old. I wasn’t a grandmother.

I was a teenager.