I’ll never forget that trip!
Mama and Daddy and I drove all the way to the coast for vacation that year!
I got to see the ocean and the beach; breathtaking even for one as young as I was.
I remember that we had a little wooden cabin near the beach. The front was a big screened-in porch, and there were places to sleep, a kitchen and a spot to eat. We had brought most of our household and kitchen stuff with us, it seemed!
I didn’t see my parents in swimming suits very often. They worked during the week and sometimes Saturdays, so we didn’t go to the town swimming pool. We had a lake near home that had a small beach area with rusty- colored sand and somewhat dark, suspicious (to me) water. We very seldom went there. Occasionally, Dad and I went to fish there. Going swimming together was special.
The ocean vacation was a big deal. Things looked different on the coast. Daddy in his swimming suit, his hairy chest bare, and white legs poking out the bottom of his suit, held my hand as we walked into the water that pushed us, then receded away. I thought Mama looked like a movie star in her red, one-piece bathing suit. She stayed on the beach mostly, relaxing.
Suddenly, Daddy started hollering!
He started hopping!
He pulled up his foot and lookee there ... a crab was hanging on his big toe!
He had caught one.
Mama and Daddy decided to cook that crab. I remember all the process they went to getting the big pot out and on the stove with water to boil. They worked to wash the sand out of the crab. Steam rose, the crab went in the pot and we waited to see the results.
Family vacations were times we spent time together with fewer interruptions than in daily life. Daddy drove, he and Mama talked, and I listened and watched.
Daddy was a locomotive engineer in World War II. He maneuvered his big, black train through the mountains and fields to go the front lines to pick up wounded soldiers. Then when they were loaded up, he drove them out to the medical tents set up to help them.
He told me once that the rides were terrible. He said there were so many dead soldiers on the railroad tracks, the conductors had to go out and salt the tracks for the engineer to get the locomotive through them.
Can you imagine?
It was one of the very few glimpses Daddy gave me of the horrors of war.
My Daddy came home from that war; lots of daddies didn’t.
We got to go on vacations and live as a family.
Lots of families sat with an empty chair at every meal.
Freedom is precious, costly and rare. We owe many men and women a great debt for the supreme price they paid as they gave their life fighting for us and our country.
“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” John 15:13
Thank you.
We remember.
