Love Letters in the South Pacific – A Boatload of WW2 Army Nurses
Happy Love Letters Valentine’s Day America!
If a picture’s worth a 1000 words
This love’s for you. It will endure.
Morris took quite a few snapshots when he was deployed in the South Pacific during WW2.
I recently got into his photo scrapbook. Quite a few amazing pics. Here’s a peek.
Morris Densmore and crew S. Pacific WW2
Some things must never change. WW2 pin up art is one of them.
Insignia of LCT 753 & friend
Nurses looking like Rosie the Riveter arrive as a boat load.
Your load of army nurses finally arrives!
God bless America! Will post more soon.
Love,
Martha D.
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Martha’s Merry Maine Christmas 2017
Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday Season!
Merry Christmas 2017!
America is having a come back. So are some Densmores. In September of 2017 I moved my mother back to Maine. We rented a farmhouse in Pemaquid a couple months. During that time we bought a house in Brunswick near Bowdoin. Our new house borders a 300 acre working organic farm. We look out upon a great expanse of land, beautiful pasture and crops.
One afternoon in the fall of 2017 I was driving Arline on a back highway here. It was Saturday. The Brunswick escrow had just closed. I was driving Arline back to our rented farmhouse. It would be our last weekend there in the Hope Woods. I turned on the radio and flicked it to an AM station.
There’s a radio station here in Maine called The Memories Station. 1960s songs were playing. Watching farms go by, many with American flags, frame by frame the purity echoed. So here I am in an Americana paradise. Classic like a Palm Springs cocktail in the 1950s. Like a Las Vegas travel ad in the 1960s. Like a TV Christmas special in the 1970s. Time never left this place. It’s never left. Back roads and farms and quaint old houses. She’s here breathing. Oh America, why did it take so long? Like an old love letter.
I’d just been contemplating Love Story’s slogan that love means never having to say your sorry. The theme of “Love Story” sung by Andy Williams started playing. The second song after I turned on the station. Then came “For All we Know” by Karen Carpenter.
Merry Christmas 2016!
Best wishes! Merry Christmas 2016! Another busy Christmas hanging with Arline.
Martha Densmore and Arline Densmore Christmas 2016
WW2 Joy of Peace! Armistice Day 2015
Wishing all war veterans everywhere peace and joy today. Armistice Day on the 11th of November commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for cessation of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I. It took effect at eleven o’clock in the morning—the “eleventh hour of eleventh day of eleventh month” of 1918. The end of World War II in Asia occurred on August 14 and 15, 1945. On August 23, 1945 the last Japanese troops on Shumshu surrendered to Soviet forces. Here’s a happy clip from the trove.
Peace brings Mardi Gras spirit back to New Orleans. Aug. 23, 1945
Mother’s Day Love Letter
In memory of a day when people wrote each other letters, I wrote to my mother on Mother’s day and read her this letter.
Dear Mother Arline,
A favorite memory was that time in the 1970s when I was twelve. You gave me the book “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931).
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
I still have it. I was just reading a passage. When you gave me the book it was one of those pivotal moments. I still wonder the reason you chose to give me this particular sacred book. I remember you handing it to me.
Mom, I’m grateful you supported my spiritual quest in my early teenage years. Kahlil Gibran had a benefactress, Mary Elizabeth Haskell. That they were lovers in spirit.
Mary Elizabeth Haskell
Kahlil Gibran’s Benefactress
Mary was ten years his senior and a school headmistress. She later married another man but continued to support Kahlil financially. When Gibran died at age 48 he willed the contents of his studio to Mary. There in his artist studio Mary discovered her letters to Kahlil spanning twenty-three years. She recognized their historical value and decided to save them. Excerpts of the over six hundred letters were published in “Beloved Prophet” in 1972. I’ve got them on order.
The Prophet writes that Love injures us in all its ways so that we may find the secrets of our own heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s Heart. He must be talking about Divine Oneness at a point in time where God was moving out of fashion in favor of homogenized spirituality.
Martha the Prophetess writes: Love is all. Love is all good. All good does not injure. It’s only humble human failings, not Love, that thresh, sift, grind and knead us as the prophet accused Love. It’s solely man’s inhumanity to man, the tyrant of a finite reality. Mortal love is at best a transitory reflection of Truth. Pain and sadness have no part in Love’s dance. True Love is Life’s unbreakable covenant, Love. True Love is Holy only.
Mom, I love you today and everyday.
Loving You,
Martha
Read MoreBowdoin College Moonlit Pines 1943
It’s 1943. The WWII draft is on. For all he knows it may be his last Valentines season. Seventy years ago Morris finds exceptional beauty in a winter night at Bowdoin College. Moonlit pines weighted with snow glisten like Christmas Trees. He writes Arline a Love Letter a few days post Valentines day, “I have never seen Bowdoin as beautiful…”
Bowdoin College Winter Night 1943
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