When You Come Marchin’ Home

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A True Story from Home

Last February was gray and long, as the lean months before spring tend to be when winter feels old. But in my mailbox on Edgewood Road, there was something new: letters from Jared about what he hoped to plant in his garden that spring. He wrote of marigolds and tomatoes. One cold day, I even found a paper package of seeds from his garden to plant in mine: cucumbers, basil, and butternut squash. Our relationship was as new as the fresh snow, and our letters brimmed with hopefulness about the spring garden, our growth in Jesus, and Jared’s first visit to Missouri when I’d wait at the window for him.

Jared and I had been talking for a few weeks when I gathered the courage to tell my grandparents about him. I stuffed my hands in my coat pockets and walked up the hill from the pond, where Papa Jay had a fire in the woodstove, sweeping smoke out into the brittle air. He was in his rocker, my grandma in her chair, and I was afraid the news would unsettle them. Maybe it did, but not for long. After a few minutes, Papa settled back to tell me the story of when he and Mema were young and in love. 

It’s a story I’ve heard many times. Papa sometimes forgets he’s told it, but I don’t stop him. Their love story began with deployment and war. It thrived on letters to each other across the sea, and I find myself needing to hear it. In fact, I’ve gone looking for other stories like it—like my friends Gene and Mindi’s Navy story—because I have a question about love that their stories help to answer. This is one: 

How can true love endure all things? (1 Cor. 13:7)

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Whenever there’s talk of weddings, Papa Jay is quick to remind us that he and Mema were married in the preacher’s living room, simple and plain. He was on leave, so it all happened in a hurry. He wore his Air Force uniform, and she ran out and bought a dress the day before. Her sister baked a pecan pie to eat afterward at their house in Madison, Illinois. Papa still talks about how good it was. 

The following Monday, Mema returned to work in the city while Papa boarded a train bound for California, then a plane that crossed the sea. He was deployed to Korea for one year, so their marriage meant no honeymoon and no first home on a little plot of land. Instead, he rode into Seoul, Korea in the back of an Army truck, where frigid winds sliced through the canvas. The buildings were made of corrugated tin, his bed was a cot.

But my grandparents were in love, and love is patient. Scripture says love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things (1 Cor 13:7), so with one week left before that deployment, they kissed and ate pie anyway.

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Gene and Mindi’s story began in a chapel in Roeland Park, Kansas. It was October 1973, and Gene had come home on leave the day before the wedding. Mindi remembers how he picked her up at the doorway and swirled her around—she in lace, he in his Navy blues. They had four months together before he had to leave for a Naval Base in Charleston, South Carolina. 

Gene had run away from home the day after he graduated high school to live with relatives until his 18th birthday, when at last, he could enlist. He had passed his exams, joined the Navy’s Nuclear Power Program, and was stationed on his first ship in June 1973 in Bremerton Washington, harbored in the cold waters of Puget Sound. 

They’d been introduced to each other in June, and he’d taken her out every night until his leave ended two weeks later. From a ship at sea, Gene wrote to Mindi’s father:

Dear Mr. Russell,
My name is Gene, and I am very much in love with your daughter. I’d like to take this opportunity to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage. 

He finished the letter with a promise:

With your permission and God’s help, me and Mindi can be happy and content as husband and wife for the rest of our life.

The response came a week later, as Mindi’s dad gave his blessing. 

May your marriage be an everlasting one.
Yours truly,
R. Russell

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On Osan Air Base in South Korea, Papa Jay worked in teletype—the fastest means of overseas communication in the 1950’s—where rolls of tape with punched holes were decoded into messages. Those days, a computer filled an entire room, and television was new to the world. “We thought it was the greatest thing,” Papa tells me.

But there were no teletype centers back in Madison—a railroad town that lay like a shorn patch among the corn fields. There was only a yellow shotgun house with a mail slot, where my grandma Naomi lived with her family. The months trailing their wedding stretched as long as an Illinois highway, as Papa wrote her letters, and she wrote back. 

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Aboard the USS Hunley, Gene carved through the gray waters of the Pacific, down through the Panama Canal, and came to port in Charleston, South Carolina, where Gene and Mindi lived for 15 months. Then they moved to Norfolk, Virginia with their six-month-old son, where Gene’s ship would go to sea. 

His duty was now aboard the USS South Carolina—a guided missile cruiser that performed escort services for an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. The winds there were balmy, and between tending vessels, the men could take it easy. They swept and painted the cabins, played cards, and toured ports on the coasts of Gibraltar, Morocco, Italy, and Spain. They gawked at cathedrals in Barcelona and went to a Harry Chapin concert in Naples. 

Gene’s letters couldn’t reach Mindi when he was at sea. Phone calls were once a month and cost $1 per minute. He sailed home for the birth of each of their children but had to return to the Mediterranean after his daughter was only four days old. Their little boy, Christopher, only recognized his daddy’s voice through the tape recorder. He wrote Gene letters and kissed a framed picture of him every night before bed.

Mindi herself had a house to run and two children to raise, so when Gene was on leave and stepped through the doorway as husband and dad, Mindi wasn’t used to it. She was the one to fix things, and if she couldn’t, she’d call her dad. War forces people apart, but it can also drive them back together for better or for worse.

But Gene’s years in the Navy changed their marriage for the better, because during that time, Gene and Mindi both surrendered their lives to Christ, anchoring their love to his love. A true love like that “endures all things.” It also “rejoices” all the more when the lover sails home.

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Hanging in Papa Jay’s office is his last letter to Mema from Korea:

Jan. 25, 1956
Korea
Dear Hon,
This is the letter I’ve been waiting to write for eleven months. Don’t write anymore because I should be gone from here by next week. 

Papa’s brother-in-law drove Mema to Union Station in St. Louis. Eleven months had passed since they’d made their vows in the preacher’s living room, and he had boarded a train on that platform. They were vows that had withstood the strain of 5,000 miles and over 300 days. Now, as Papa stepped off the train and Mema hurried toward him, they’d be vows that would bind them together for good.

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In April 1974, a Charleston newspaper ran the headline:

USS Hunley Returns Home

On the docks of the Naval Station were members of the Navy band, the mayor and his wife, hundreds of onlookers, and Mindi.  She was holding a friend’s little girl at the railing, along with other Navy wives who had become dear friends. On the horizon lay the dark, sharp nose of a ship, slicing the waters as it neared them. A hundred men in white waved and blew kisses from its decks. They all looked identical across the harbor, but Mindi waved anyway, knowing Gene was one of them.

At last, he was home. 

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February has come to Edgewood Road again. Today, when I came around the pond and up the hill, there was a warm wind, and smoke came from Papa’s burn pile rather than the chimney. In the living room, we talked about the sunshine and Valentine’s Day. They will be married 69 years on the 14th. 

Papa asked about Jared, too. 

“Can you imagine,” he said after a minute, “getting married, then seeing him leave just seven days later?”

“No,” I said. “I can’t.”

Papa shook his head. “I don’t know how I ever did it.”

But he did, because true love is not just hopeful. It is patient. It waits at the railing like a young bride; but Christlike love also lasts long after the soldier has marched home, when it settles in for the long years of raising children and clearing the land and making a home. 

From Papa and Mema’s house on Edgewood Road, Gene and Mindi live just up the street and through the trees. Both have made a home here. Both have raised children and grandchildren who are rooted in this community. Both have found themselves members at First Baptist Church, and both couples have built their lives on a love that didn’t collapse under war, but was made to endure by it—like a gold ring refined by fire.

It’s this kind of rooted love I’d like to plant, as I write letters, and wait at the window in February, and try to practice patient endurance that will last long into marriage. When I do, I’m practicing the kind of love Jesus calls us to, when he says to wait for the day he’ll sweep up his bride at the doorway—the day when he’ll take us home. 

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