Memory

I have spent the morning at the gun club, not a place I ordinarily spend much time. It is a place my husband and sons and cousin love and they thoroughly enjoy the precision target shooting. Their skills vary but seemingly not their pleasure, and all are turned out today as it is the end of year championships, a big day with a real festival atmosphere. I am being useful in scoring. Accountants always get the numbers jobs.

Strange to smell the cordite. And it creates an echo of memory and with it a different perspective after all these years.

I grew up in a war. A dirty little civil, race inspired war. Vicious, bitter, cruel, ugly.

I grew up on a homestead on a farm and such isolated dwellings were vulnerable to attack. Because manpower was desperately short young teenagers on farms were armed and taught to use weapons. I was one of many such. Sure enough when attack happened I did as I was trained and shot back, like many other teenagers caught up in an adult world that we didn't understand. It was a time that introduced us to the terrible world of death and grief as many of our contemporaries died in the conflict.

The cordite smell today brought back those sad, ugly memories.

And the strange thought that I am grateful to be able to offer prayers for all those of my school friends who died in the war on the Feasts of All Souls and All Saints. For a long time, year on year I have attended a service somewhere and remembered. Faithfully. In grief often enough, and over the passage of the years with a deepening love for those lives were brutally cut short, and their families who have had to live with the losses that never really ease.