The letter to my brother
About a year ago I found a letter in my grandparents’ old family Bible. My mother, Emma Sisk, had written the letter to my brother, Lee R. Sisk, who was in the Army serving in Korea. He had been writing to Mom saying he was very homesick. Mom’s letter was dated September 3, 1949.
This letter never got mailed. It stayed in the family Bible until I found it.
Mom mentions my name, Ina, in the letter, saying how excited I was about my first year in school and my grandmother’s birthday. She worked out of town then, and in her letter she told my brother that she cried often when she was away from home. She talks about us, his younger brothers and sisters, working in the cornfield, cutting the tops, and pulling and bundling the fodder for the livestock the coming winter.
Mom died three years after she wrote the letter. Our grandparents, Sudie Mae and Drayton Beheler, raised us on their farm in Bostic. When I found the letter, I felt like a child again, jumping up and down like I had found a lost toy.
After the Army, my brother resumed college at Berea, Ky., and in 1956 moved from Bostic to Griffin, Ga., where he worked at the Georgia Experiment Station for 30 years as an animal science researcher. When I sent Lee a copy of the letter, he was 85 and sick with a heart problem. He passed away about a week after he received our Mom’s letter to him. His wife, Dixie, said he was so thrilled to see it, he could hardly believe what he had.
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