From: Mettalaw@aol.com
Date: Tue Nov 27 2001 - 02:10:56 PST
My mother was a Dutch nurse during the War, forced to take care of POWs, Nazis, and her own countryfolk under pretty rigorous working conditions---so rigorous that she herself contracted TB and diphtheria, one of them twice, as a matter of fact. The illnesses caused her to gain some weight, so by the time her long-lost fiancee returned from German prison in Kiel, where he had been held as conspirator in the Dutch Underground for four year, she was pretty plump. There wasn't a darned thing to make a wedding dress out of ----except parachutes. So my mother went to her wedding in a silk dress recycled from parachutes. She had the traditional thing: horse and carriage to City Hall for the civil wedding, and then to the church. About two years later, a daughter was baptized, gussied up in the same silk, recycled once more to provide a magnificent christening gown, oyster silk bedecked with handmade pink flowers. The kid was huge--ten Dutch pounds, which is about eleven American pounds---fuzzed with an enormous thatch of black hair, adn apparently equipped with brain and heart to match. This was the first post-War child, and was she ever loved and fussed over! I still have my christening gown. My mother enrolled, at 82, in a writing course for children's lit, and she's currently writing a story about a fellow nurse who was a member of the Underground as her final assignment. Quite the lady.... Aloha from Hawaii Eva