Two Women Without a Man

Scanning some old family snapshots, I came across the above image. From 1944, my mother is on the right with one of her friends. It was an interesting time. With millions of men away, there were millions of young women working in factories, many of them right off the farm, and living independently for the first time, with new opportunities. The album contains many pictures of my mother with her friends—they were having the time of their lives. But this picture was special, when I turned it over I found this inscription to my mother:



Needless to say, my mother never talked about having had any “special” girlfriends, her own “honey bun.” In little over a year after the picture was taken the war would be over and the girls would drift apart, most of them getting married and starting families.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” said The Weaver when I showed her the picture and the inscription. Well, maybe it doesn’t mean something specific, but it does have meaning.