My Yankee Girl

Book excerpt: THE YANKEE VILLAGE OF LONG RIDGE CRADLES OUR STORY of a boy and girl working, play-wrestling, and growing amid the red barns and broad haylands adjoining their homes. After school and doing chores, when the long afternoons of Eastern War Time turned warm with the season, the young pals rode a great, black horse across fields and over stone walls, moving as one rider with its animal power. They often sought a deep pond in the forest, stripped to scant underwear and swam in the chill waters, then sunned themselves dry on a warm shelf of rock. In these swift hours, stolen out of time, they left unspoken the special feelings they sensed, signified by tasting each other with a first kiss beside a woodland spring. Yet time and the war were hurrying their lives. Come darkness on the hill and they could see on the horizon the flaming glow of dying American ships, loaded oil tankers torpedoed by Nazi submarines. Yet before the young couple finishes their teen years, they leave the Ridges to seize their futures at home, at sea, and in a world at war. It was a time when all goodbyes were uncertain and some were forever.