Youth. It sprinkled over the trees when springtime came. It kissed the birds’ nests and bloomed on the riverbanks, white, yellow, and red.

Deer perked up with warm new fawns at their flanks. Rabbits poked from their holes. The stream bubbled, flashing with droplets where a frog or two sprung. The trees rustled with new leaves as if speaking to one another. They housed the chattering brown squirrels who spoke like good neighbors where the branches swayed and dipped in the daytime flow.

Some miles from the forest lay San Fernando. The little settlement, not far from bustling Los Angeles, carried a life of its own. It was just as bright and lively as the large city.

From the edges of winter’s den, the world stirred and rose. It gave way as the first sun of March yawned over the horizon.

The husband held his wife’s hat down from the wind. She laughed with a smile that seemed as if it could charm any living thing. Joseph and Marion Hayes—newcomers who rapidly turned into cheerful regulars. They were right-on pictures of the new century: beautiful before the war came.

Tall, dark-haired Joseph with his trim dress jacket crossed the walk. He said a “How do you do?” to buyers and stragglers alike. His parents used to come often to the town, charmed by the sweet breeze and smiling as easily as life would let them. Marion hung on his right arm. She was prettier than sunlit petals and crowned by a wave of golden brown.

The town knew them sooner than they knew the town. In all its noise and shouting—the knick-knack of blacksmiths’ hammers and tailors’ shears—heads turned quite often to watch them pass or wave them on.

As it would happen to be, they'd come from golden San Francisco to seek a life of quiet warmth and humility. They sold or left behind their furniture, block apartment, telephones, and clocks. They brought suitcases to drag out one by one, somehow capturing the sparkling, brief light of the Bay. 

Their light would come by, brightly glowing, to talk and joke and laugh. Then, there were errands to run and new tables to move. The light would go, leaving a hint of its homely presence behind.

Time followed Joseph and Marion everywhere. Years came and went like a bunch of dry, scattered leaves. They came and went before the wind turned them into fine dust, crushed by the unchanging stones of Mother Nature.

Back and forth from the cabin in the woods to town’s streets Joseph and Marion went. They were always together. 

Joseph found work as a carpenter. Marion was a nurse.

It was like the cold parted to let them through.

Marion soon gently carried a bundle in her arms. Their little son, Jonathan Carter Hayes, was born on the eleventh of July. Summer had just begun to peak. Their warmth only grew.

Marion showed Jonathan to the tailor and shoemaker and everyone else in the quiet farm-town. It was like he’d already known them for some time. Jonathan laughed wide-eyed in the way babies do but with a soft closeness that no one could quite name.

The postman’s son, Henry Rusterd, was not yet the postman or a man at all. Yet, he saw something in the innocent stare that made him feel very far and old.

Even a newborn was not enough for fate to allow Joseph and Marion a long life of peace. Bitter and mild, winter came to grow bored. The Great War had been raging for over three years already when the order for men to join the fight came. 25-year-old Joseph was swept away from his home and family.

Goodbyes were said and tears wrung. The sad headshakes of townspeople were seen often that day as Joseph shouldered his pack. Ever smiling, he was driven away on the main road with a rumbling of dust.

Marion clung to hope. Their little boy, not yet two years of age, knew nothing of it all.