Chiquita Writes of Wars, 1941

“In this short space of my life since I wrote of my husband’s doings after I left him in Portugal, great calamity has spread to parts of the world that were at peace.  I was just recording my troubles during the First World War, and here we are in the middle of another one, much improved in the art of destruction!   What a dual life I am living just now between these two wars, although twenty-three years lie between World War I and World War II!  I had to go back to see where I stopped recording the things that happened long ago to the children and me here in Wooster.  My, what a temptation it is to mix up the present with the past!

One Sunday during that earlier world war, I went for a walk by myself after church.  I think it was the first time I was out alone for a walk in the countryside.  My how beautiful the ripe wheat fields were!  The breeze went over them and up and down, making them look like waves of gold.  That day I remembered having read in one of my husband’s letters about the restrictions on food, so I picked two sprigs of wheat, and put them in a letter I wrote that evening, saying “Do not fear for the field, the United States are covered with golden wheat, and they will not let their allies suffer hunger.”  My children said to me, “Mother, the first censor will throw away those sprigs.  Do you think they will be bothered with it?”  Well, the sprigs got to their destination all right.”