“Living for Just You!”
Another photograph shows Seattle’s Aurora Bridge stretching across the landscape, with Mount Rainier visible in the distance.
On the back, my father wrote:
“Living for just you!”
It is another remarkably personal message preserved on the back of an otherwise ordinary souvenir photograph. My father could have written something about the bridge, the view, or the places he was seeing. Instead, once again, he wrote about Mary.
Those few words take on even greater meaning when I think about the circumstances in which he wrote them. He was a young man in the service, thousands of miles from the woman he planned to marry, living through a period when neither of them could know exactly when they would be together again.
Each photograph was showing Mary another piece of the world he was experiencing, but the messages on their backs reveal something much more important.
“Darling, I love you.”
“Wish you were here.”
“Your everything to me.”
And now:
“Living for just you!”
Taken together, these weren’t simply messages written on souvenirs. They were a conversation across the miles, preserved because my mother chose to keep everyone.
Read More From Nancy
The Miles Between Them
Among the papers my mother saved is a small cloth pouch that, at first glance, might be easy to overlook. Printed across it are the words “U.S. Mail from Seattle, Wash.” A leather strip closes the bottom, and still attached to it is the original mailing tag. The tag is addressed to Miss Mary Hannigan, […]
“Darling, I Love You”
One of the little photographs shows Mount Rainier rising above the landscape, its snow-covered peak dominating the view. Turn it over. In my father’s handwriting are the words: “Darling, I love you.” There is something particularly moving about finding those words more than eighty years later. My father wasn’t writing for anyone else to read. […]
“Your Everything to Me”
In the front is the famous totem pole in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. Turn it over. My father wrote: “Your everything to me.” These few words tell me something that military records, census documents, newspaper articles and official family records never could. They allow me to hear my father’s voice. Before my parents became husband and […]
