Yesterday all was well and today looks like a great day. The sun is so bright it’s almost blinding. I have an errands, but I’m putting them off until later so I can loll on the deck with a cold drink and my newest book, The Jefferson Key. My irrigation guy came by this morning and turned on the lawn system and my outside shower. My landscaper, who lives next door, was with him, and I asked him to have a few things done in my yard. The last of my flowers are waiting for planting, weeds in the front need to go to their heavenly rewards and the backyard has to be weed-whacked. Tomorrow, he said.

Today is D-Day. My mother once had a D-Day party and put up maps of the landing sites, played WWII music and had The Longest Day playing on the VCR. My dad used to tell us about when he was in the hospital in England during the invasion, and the wounded never seemed to stop coming. They told him our troops were getting slaughtered by heavy resistance. Most of the soldiers were pessimistic about our chances to defeat Germany. That, of course, was at the beginning. We visited a few sites on one of our trips to Europe. The Ardennes was the spookiest with its ground fog and its silence. In the woods were tank traps looking like dragon’s teeth. We passed signs for Malmedy, and my dad told us about the massacre of American prisoners of war by the “bloody Germans” as he called them. All the sites we saw and visited were new to my dad as well. He had been a sailor whose ship had been sunk by the Germans in the North Atlantic. We followed signs along the same route the Americans had taken as the army made its way inland; we visited WW II museums and stayed in Bastogne. It was a remarkable trip.

Memories of events grow dim and finally disappear over time. Each new generation loses something as the previous generations age and finally disappear. I grew up hearing all my mother’s favorite songs including her World War II favorites. I know all the words to them. My niece and nephews don’t know them, no reason why they should. The songs aren’t played any more. I remember all my dad’s World War II stories, and they have been passed down, but I suspect they’ll end with the generation behind me. They have no connections the way we did.

I am a child of the 50’s and 60’s, and I have so many memories of growing up then, memories of the things I did and what I believed. They are still vivid to me but only to me. Soon enough, they too will fade and finally disappear, and the next generation will fill the void with their own memories.