![The Uell and Melba Brown family. Photo Credit: Courtesy Janice Brown Bradley](/images/resized/images/news/2016/348_dec03/23_100_100.jpg)
I am grateful for our veterans.
KEEPER
Their Marriage was good, their dreams focused.
Their best friends lived barely a wave away. I can see them now, Dad in trousers, shirt and a hat and Mom in a house dress, lawn mower in his hand, and dish-towel in hers. It was the time for fixing things. A curtain rod, the kitchen radio, screen door, the oven door, the hem in a dress. Things we keep.
It was a way of life, and sometimes it made me crazy. All that re-fixing, eating, renewing, I wanted just once to be wasteful. Waste meant affluence. Throwing things away meant you knew there’d always be more.
But then my mother died, and on that clear summer’s night, in the warmth...