“Supporting our troops” is far more complex when you are personally connected to a soldier—when you feel like Mary Jony, a mother of an Army Ranger who writes, “the world has…shrunk to one man, one boy I want alive above all else.”
J E F F E KENNEDY’s Air Force father crashed his plane when she was only three. She writes about her journey twenty-five years later, along with her mother, to the site where he died. She finds the un-obvious low place in a silent cornfield, a spot that represents the painful truth that “sometimes people don’t come home.” 
Most of the stories unfold with war as the backdrop—sometimes it looms, sometimes it wages, and sometimes it lingers from the past inside the writer’s house.
Some of the stories center on the concept of “home” itself, and the search for roots in a culture where home is constructed, and de-constructed around frequent relocations and deployments. Each woman, in her own words and style, tells a unique story, and collectively they illuminate the pathos of this unsung microcosm of American society....
Jeffe lives in Wyoming and writes, "It's such a relief to see a swallow as it should be--I feel restored to see it fly, black and tan shining against the sky. It seems a moment from a novel."
~Jeffe Kennedy, from Wyoming Trucks, True Love and the Weather Channel, University of New Mexico Press, March 2004
http://www.jeffekennedy.com
1 comment:
Wow, that photo of the cornfield and broken tree seems innocuous but it represents an amazing story/journey/legacy of Jeffe's military family. Thanks for sharing....One of our early reviewers called Jeffe's piece "a knock out!" It is! I cry evertime I read it. Missy
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