"The leaving soldier gave a hug
To his little sister.
"Must you go away?" she
asked.
"Yes," he said and kissed
her.
She waved good-bye to him,
As she breathed a silent prayer,
"Please God keep him safe
When he goes way over there."
She wrote him letters every
day,
So he was close to home.
She was faithful by the windows,
And was always near the phone.
For many months this happened,
'Till he shouted on the phone,
"Hey, dear sis, guess what?
I'mma comin' home!"
Ducking off the taxi,
While hugging his little sis,
He said "I love you" just
before
He gave a great big kiss."
I remembered that poem this summer, and decided to try to write a prose version of it, in a ten-year-old's voice, since, after all, it's about the dedicated little sister. Besides, I figured it might be something to submit to Highlights or something like that. So that's what you'll be reading here.
“Do you gotta leave?”
Kelsie asked her brother, giving him a long, hard hug.
Andrew looked sad. “Yes,” he said. “I got to. Keep…keep good
care of Mom and Dad, okay? And specially of Scraps.”
“I will,” she whispered, nodding. Andrew kissed her forehead.
“Good. Stay out of trouble.”
He turned around and joined the rest of the group of
camouflage-wearing soldiers already at the security waiting line, while Kelsie
and Mom walked out of the airport and back to their car.
Just before they reached the car, Kelsie waved goodbye one
last time.
“He can’t see you, honey,” Mom said gently.
“…Yeah. I know. But I just wanted to him to know, anyway.”
She was pretty quiet for most of the rest of the day.
Everybody was, really. Except for Scraps. Andrew’s tortoiseshell cat wandered
around the house searching for him, meowing pitifully. She didn’t understand
why he had to leave. Neither did Kelsie, really; only that it had something to
do with a war and that meant Andrew was needed….somewhere. It had a very
strange name that was impossible to say or spell.
“Please, God, keep him safe while he’s over there…wherever
that is. I need him to teach me how to hit a ball, and explain how to multiply
things.”
Life kept on, though. School started again, and everybody
gradually developed a new routine. Daddy stayed at work more often, and when he
was home he tried to teach Kelsie how to hit a whiffle ball, to get ready for
softball season next summer. Mom looked like she wanted to cry a lot. So she
worked in her garden and talked on the phone to her friends to keep her mind
occupied.
Kelsie went to school and then would write a letter to
Andrew almost every day. He wasn’t able to write back very often, but sometimes
he could. Those were good days, when Frank the mailman would walk up with a
letter from him. Frank seemed to like that Andrew was writing them, and glad
that he could drop those letters off. Mom or Dad talked to him about what the
letters said once they’d read them, and Frank would tell what his son’s letters
had said. His son was a soldier, too.
While Kelsie was writing to Andrew, Scraps would sometimes
sit by her on the table or in her lap. Sometimes she would jostle Kelsie’s arm,
and that made the pencil go all squiggily. When she complained to Mom about it,
Mom said that was Scraps’s way of writing; so that made it less annoying.
Everybody paid a lot more attention to the news, and the phone ringing made
them all jump to be the one to answer it.
She’d work on her math homework by the living room window,
since she’d read in a book that watching windows was how cats watched TV.
Scraps certainly did that a lot, and so she figured they could both tell if
Andrew came down the road one day as a surprise.
One afternoon in March the phone rang just as she’d gotten
home from school. Mom was off in the attic somewhere putting the Christmas
stuff away, so Kelsie answered it.
“Hello? This is Kelsie. Who’s calling?”
“Hey, sis! It’s me!”
Kelsie almost dropped the phone, she was so excited.
“Guess what?”
“What?”
“I’m comin’ home!”
It was such good news, she had to tell somebody. So she ran
and found Scraps and told her, and then told Mom once she came back downstairs.
“Well, did he say when?! Is he okay?”
“Nope. Just that he’d call back when he could. He sounded
really glad to be back.”
Shaking her head, but smiling, Mom went back to work packing
up all the winter clothes. She even sang some, a verse or two of a church song
or something from the radio. Kelsie read a book called Black Gold, by the same lady that wrote Misty of Chincoteague. Scraps’s ears went up and her tail fluffed
out, seeing somebody pulling into the driveway. Kelsie looked up from her book
and saw Andrew stepping out of Frank’s
pickup!
She flew out the door and wrapped him in a huge bear hug “You’re back!”
“Sure I am. Told ya I was coming, didn’t I?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
“He wanted it to be a surprise,” Frank said, smiling.
“It was,” she nodded.
“I bet.”
“Love you, sis.” Andrew kissed her forehead. “Now let’s go
say hi to Mom, all right?”
They walked to the other side of Frank’s truck and hauled
his duffel bag out of the backseat. Mom stepped onto the front porch.
“Something wrong, Frank?”
“No, ma’am. Just delivering a package.” He
backed out of the driveway, revealing Andrew and Kelsie, hauling his duffel
bag. Mom screamed and ran forward to greet her son.
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