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Our Miss Boo

This Wiser Year

Table of Contents

To-day I had a letter from my friends in Denmark.

“You remember our rose garden,” it said. “Where it used to be, we have grown 450 pounds of potatoes.”

I sat there weeping for the roses, which we shall never see again, weeping and feeling guilty, because surely there are more vital things to weep about this year than roses which have given up their lives for potatoes.

Then I thought, “But ... it is roses we are fighting for. The right to grow roses. And to give children’s parties, and to wear perfume, and to belong to family orchestras, if we wish....” That cleared up something for me.

All last year I could barely write. I sat in stricken silence because it seemed flippant effrontery to write of daily happiness while in Europe people I loved suffered and died. So I sat day after day, giving up the very things which they are suffering and dying to keep.

But this is a wiser year.

We cannot close our eyes and forget. But we can keep them open and remember. And we can hold on to what is true in our living ... the roses and the children, and school books, and joking, and music ... and people kissing good-by in the morning, and coming home at night.

These are the things ... the simple, small, tremendous things whose names, a few of them, are written in this book. It isn’t much; it’s only something to remember us by.