These days...

...I am often serenaded by the swinging, jazzy sounds of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, to name a few. It's such mellow, rich music.

My time line has turned into a massive thing and I will have to break it down into several parts; local culture, America in whole, and the war abroad.

That way, I will know at a glance that in the summer of 1943 when Helen was leaving the movie theaters after watching "Lassie Come Home" with her pals, Red was with the 1st ID in the battle for Sicily because Winston Churchill convinced America to go through Africa and not directly into Europe, effectively sealing the fate of Central and Eastern Europe.

In the meantime, Helen pays with pennies made out of steel, because of a shortage of copper and listens to Frank Sinatra sing "Strangers in the Night." She's thirty years old, with a Victory Garden the back yard and taking very good care of her shoes, because they've been rationed and new ones are hard to get.

I watched a clip of "The World at War" and nearly wept at the fall of Poland. The country was cut in two between Germany and Russia and only Warsaw was able to hold out; for three weeks the city defiantly played the Polish National Anthem while under unrelenting bombardment. But the city was decimated and on September 23rd the music stopped.

In more current news, my cold is almost gone and I'm left with only a chapped, red nose. It was suppose to be sunny today, but the sky is covered with a thin film of cloud that thins down the light. I was going to be busily productive and clean the floors and the window sills and rake the front yard and buy stamps, but so far I have yet even to get dressed. Oh well, I'll blame it on the lingering effects of the common cold.

Keith has got semi official word that he will be moving somewhere else soon, along with the rest of his company. There is no Internet where he'll be and he doesn't know for sure if there will be phones. That sounds crazy. How can there not be phones? There must be.

There won't be any other Americans. He can't tell me what he will be doing and my darling Staff Sergeant is not a man that knows how to paint a rosy picture; he always tells it like it is and apparently it is dangerous.

So there is a chance that I will finish out this deployment reduced to letter writing while he is out in the dangerous middle of no where. How ironic. I really didn't want to take my research quite this seriously.

I just let the dogs out and it is actually warmer outside than it is in the house. I'm going to throw some clothes on and go out for walk and try not to dread the future quite so much. At least I can always distract myself with the past. It's pretty amazing actually, how comforting the past can be with its larger perspective.