This Christmad Morning, Installment 8

Chapter 3, Part 3

Ariel was back in the basement, engrossed in a pile of love letters and fingering her Grandpa’s Purple Heart. She was reading chronologically, and had followed Grandpa from basic training at

Camp

Rucker

in

Alabama

to the hills around

Nashville

for maneuvers. The letters trailed from the deserts of

Arizona

, where Grandpa was preparing to fight someone called “the krauts” to

San Francisco

where they were shipping out for the invasion of the Philippine Islands.

Knowing that she would be missed if she tarried longer, Ariel skipped to the letter at the bottom of the pile. World War II had just ended, the future looked bright and a young man was writing from a hospital ship on the way home, asking his beloved if she would be his wife.

It was the most beautiful thing that Ariel had ever read.