Freedom Fighters

I wrote this while in France, with the intention of including it in a travelogue:

“Impressionnante.” We mostly kept a solemn silence, supported by brief observations. It was the home states on the graves that got me. Like I’d just met the soldiers and asked where they were from. People I could know. Young men like me.

He was from Brittany, but she grew up in Normandy, so when we left the beach for food she called her parents for a dining recommendation. Her mother began proposing meals we could have at their house. “How do galettes sound?”

“Yes. I remember my father telling me about the GIs – how they gave him chocolate as they passed by his yard.” The scene played, black and white, in my mind, a soup of all the old WWII movies I’d seen. I wanted to know everything about my grandfather’s soldier experience, to show that I fit into this real thing told in personal stories, not just studied in school or watched in films. “Have you had macaroons before? Roquefort?”