To The Editor:
Notes from Wanda Meriems Johnson’s Journal March 16, 1948.
My mother, born in Egypt, immigrated to the U.S. in 1941. She died in 2020 close to the age of 106. All her life she kept journals. After she died, they came to me. I have begun to read them. This short piece she wrote in March of 1948. Immediately I felt it mirrored my own thoughts about the current world situation; wars in Israel/Gaza, Russia/Ukraine, Sudan, Nigeria, threats of war toward Venezuela and more that I cannot name.
She wrote:
“This is a plea for peace. I am in the kitchen, looking out through the storm windows of our little farm home in a small village (West Townshend) of Vermont in the West River Valley. It might be thought of as a gloomy day. The fog is dense and it is raining. But the snow is melting and it is warmer than it has been for a long, long time. Our three children, two boys and a girl, are playing on the porch and they are happy, very happy because for the first time they don’t need their snowsuits and have on their old spring coat and hat, and Cordy rushing in said, “The cricket is singing, it is like spring!”
All the while I was dressing them, cleaning after breakfast, dressing myself for the day, a thought persisted deep from the roots of love for my family, my husband, my children, my sisters and brother, my parents, who have died only a few years ago, my friends scattered all over the world, my neighbors, my fellow being(s), and that woman who talked to me yesterday pouring her sorrow out into the open, gushing out from the deep wound in her heart – a thought was hovering over my mind.
How could it be possible that all this could be destroyed this love, this happiness, by war, a factor of destruction. Why, why, should there be war, and why are we, the people, so helpless. Why must we let those infernal politicians bring about a mass slaughter of wonderful men, women, and children, and after a rest period repeat the whole massacre again.”
I was struck that what my mother wrote 77 years ago, was so very similar to our world today. Sharing this, 77 years later, is my plea for Peace.
Carol Johnson Collins
Duxbury, Vermont
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