How are your hands dear? Mine are sore, very chapped, and frostbitten. I dream some nights of your cooking. Yes, I still remember how the smell filled our cottage when we were under the weather. I wish to be as snowed in here as I was then with you. I wonder now if you are still lying in our bed, in the house I built you years ago, or if some other place has caught your fancy. I wish for you the safest of places. Not as I am now, surrounded by light-headed men, cramped in our small barracks. I’ve lost my only photograph of you, taken from my locket by the wind as I looked to glance at it weeks ago. No matter, for you never leave my mind. I might have forgotten your face from the photograph, but never your wave from the train station when i left summers ago. 

Some nights I lay half awake trying to pry at my memories. The best of you are now dead dreams. We live in cloth houses now and I lie on the cold ground. The soldiers are in hopes that we will sleep in barracks soon. I am in hopes that I may gain strength to live one day and another, and that I may arrive at home.