Longing For Home

Speech given by Lisa Lansing Simont on Memorial Day, May 25, 2015.

Two thousand fifteen is a year for anniversaries: It’s the 70th of the end of WWII; the 60th of the end of the Korean Conflict; the 150th of the end of the Civil War; and the 40th of the end of the Vietnam Conflict.

It’s even the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, although it’s safe to say Cornwall, Connecticut, didn’t have a dog in that fight!

But we did in the other wars both far away and here at home. After the servicemen and women had gone away to take up their duties, the families they left behind lived their version of the war, out of harm’s way, but often lonely and worried. Every family has its stories and its memories. Here are some of mine.

Here in Cornwall during World War Two we were a community mostly made up of women. My mother and I moved in with my grandmother Martha Hubbard for the duration. Three of her five children were away in the war – Gordon and Tom in the Navy and Lydia in the International Red Cross. It was a quiet life. My mother and grandmother planted a large garden and kept chickens to supplement wartime rationing. Milk was delivered several times a week from the Calhoun barn.

We all waited for the mail, the telegrams and sometimes the telephone. I was three years old by the end of the war, but even as a toddler I could sense the tension in the waiting.

Once in a while my father came home on leave from his ship, tall and handsome in his uniform. I thought he was terrific! Once or twice my mother and I went down to New York on the train from West Cornwall, summoned by my father calling from a pay phone at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He had a few hours ashore and was dying to see us. It was very exciting but after my father returned to his ship -- and we were back home in Cornwall -- my mother cried and hugged me very hard. I remember that.

Between these rare leaves my parents wrote hundreds of letters to each other, letters full of affection and funny stories which masked the loneliness my mother felt and the danger my father was often near. Letters found their way from Cornwall to the South Atlantic traveling finally to my father over a rope line between ships, the mailbag bouncing up and down, skimming the water. Letters went back over the same route to Cornwall where they were read and reread again and again. These letters -- hundreds of them tied up in bundles and sorted by date -- fill two large cartons at our house. I haven’t the heart to throw them away.

By this time 70 years ago service personnel were coming home and picking up where their lives had stopped. This was what they had longed for – to get back on the tractor, bring in the hay and have supper with the family. Just the ordinary events of living, precious to them because they could have lost it all far away in some place whose name you couldn’t pronounce. Still, being home took getting used to, especially with a family that had learned to get along by itself during the long years of deployment. Everyone had to adjust to peacetime life.

Who were they? Their names are on the memorial stones behind me. Some of these men didn’t make it home and those are the ones we honor today. The lucky ones came home to the place where they longed to be and helped build this community into the Cornwall we love. Many of them are gone now too, some are buried in the North Cornwall Cemetery where Virginia Gold told some of their stories this morning.

We all have our stories. Remember them. Tell them. Keep on telling them to the children and the grandchildren so they can carry these memories into the future.

Thank you!