Reintegration

Since she’s had my baby, Lord, how I’d love to see her again just once. The boys make dirty jokes about her and I don’t care, I’m telling you, I just don’t. ’Cause the day I rode up to her momma’s house and brought her to the church to make her my bride, when she was so skinny about the waist, I pictured her getting fat one day, and not so girly.

Not just fat, I seen her in my mind’s eye old, wrinkly and foul. In that purdy white dress her mammaw made, I tried to picture her foul. But even when she’s old like that, I seen her pretty blue eyes and her modest expression, and I knew as long as she had that soft expression, she would always be purdy to me. It’s the darnedest thing. Ain’t a woman who lived purdier than my girl, that’s for sure.

I met her in high school. She was almost 17 on our wedding day, two weeks before I shipped out. And soon enough she wrote me a letter telling me, she says, “Come home soon. I’m having your baby soon.” It scared the hell out of me, ’cause I’m a daddy now. But I just want to see my girl. I just want to know how she looks since being a momma. I know she looks different, I already know she won’t be the same. But I do think, I really do, I think, she’ll be even purdier.