Valentines Day

Of course Valentines Day is nothing.

No holiday matters when girls like me come home each night to empty bungalows with the murder of millions tossed onto their doorsteps.

How morbid. I look at what I've just written and realize I'm feeling sorry for myself even when I'm trying to pretend I'm not. I'd better snap out of it before break's over or I'll catch heck from the foreman.

So I might as well be honest. After all, it's not as though anyone but me is ever going to read this.

It's my fourth Valentines Day alone. How many more will there be? Should there be? I love Bob desperately and always will. But the Army says he's never coming back and I can't possibly know what General MacArthur and all his Lieutenant Generals and sub-generals and whatever else they're called don't. My heart thinks it does, but my head knows better.

Tad is a good man, who says he loves me. Whatever that mysterious war work he's in charge of across the mountains in Hanford is, he takes it seriously.

If I spurn him, what am I to do? The war's ending. Oh, sure, the posters tells us to "Keep at it, this war's not won by a darned sight," but everyone can tell. My cousin Nick at home in Portland wrote that old man Henry Kaiser's already planning to scale back employment at the shipyards. "Back to the auto shop," he said, "assuming there will be cars after the war."

I remember hearing Prime Minister Churchill say on the radio two years ago that it was "the end of the beginning." Now, it's the beginning of the end. And it's up to me to decide what happens next.

Drat, there's the whistle. Back to the bombers.