The Long Wait

My kids are on Spring Break this week and as I try to entertain them while staying on a budget, we decided to make a few day trips instead of going anywhere for a vacation. Namely, because we can't afford a vacation right now and well that it the only reason.
While looking into things to do that are within a two hour drive I decided that I wanted to take the family to Andersonville Prison National Historic Site. If you don't know about Andersonville, here is a quick history lesson: during the civil war the Union and Confederate Army's exchanged Prisoner's of War in the early days of the conflict, but it soon became apparent that all they were doing was setting lose soldiers to fight again another day. Both the Union and Confederacy then started to build prisons to house said POW's (side note: the Union Army housed captured Confederate soldiers on ships in Boston Harbor, the conditions of these ships were inhuman and thousands died). Andersonville, or Ft. Sumter (the official name of the prison) was built in southwest Georgia because there was timber, water, a rail line, and it was not too close to the fighting. Some 13,000 Union soldiers ended dying at Andersonville from fetid water that caused dysentery or open wounds that went untreated or from exposure. As I dragged my two boys, a friend of the boys, and my husband around the 26 acre site, we came to the POW museum.
The museum was not just about civil war POW's but, soldiers from every era of American warfare. In the very back was a video that was playing in an ongoing loop. As I sat mesmerized by the words and pictures I was seeing I realized that all three children had slowly come and sat near me. We watched as people described what it was like to not only be a POW, but how it effected the families at home. There were families during Vietnam that literally went years without any word on their loved one, not knowing if they were still alive or if they were being tortured. My heart fluttered and I felt the sting of tears in my eyes. Some of these children were in elementary school when their dad was captured and a few had grown and joined the military so when their father came home they were and adult in uniform face-to-face with their father.
It is times like this that bring my world into perspective, I can get so wound up in the craziness of my life and then I hear about or see something like this and it reminds me to count my blessings because my husband came home. Thank God.
And that is life, how I see it.
-april