I reached in and pulled out a card with a smudge of grease in the corner. The name was Edward Vance. He was nineteen, a private first class from a small town outside of Bowling Green.

I wrote my first letter on lined notebook paper. I told him about the snow in Illinois, and how our school basketball team had lost three games in a row. I told him my mother had burnt the Sunday pot roast again. I felt incredibly silly writing it.

Three weeks later, his reply arrived in our mailbox. The envelope was thin, made of cheap paper, with an army post office stamp in the corner. His handwriting was large and slanted. “Clara,” he wrote. “Your letter is the first thing that hasn’t smelled like diesel fuel in six months. Tell me more about the burnt pot roast. Tell me about nothing at all. That is exactly what I need.”

And so I did. For two years, we wrote twice a month. I kept his letters in an old blue tin box with a chipped lid that had once held peppermint candies. I kept it hidden under my mattress, away from my brothers’ prying eyes.

Eddie wrote about the red clay that turned to thick soup when it rained. He wrote about the heat that made your clothes stick to your back by six in the morning. But mostly, he wrote about his family’s farm. He told me about the old oak tree by the creek and how the tobacco leaves smelled when they were curing in the barn.

I don’t even know why I remember this part, but he once sent me a dried oak leaf tucked inside an envelope. It was crushed to dust by the time it reached Illinois, but I kept the tiny brown fragments in the bottom of that blue tin box anyway. I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world.

Then, in November of 1971, the letters simply stopped. I wrote three more times. I bought the special airmail envelopes with the red and blue borders. I sat at my desk until my fingers were cramped, asking him if he was alright, if he was coming home soon.

Nothing came back. There was no return-to-sender stamp. There was just a flat, empty silence that settled over our mailbox. Every afternoon at three, I would stand by the front window, waiting for the mail truck to pull up. The postmaster, Mr. Gentry, knew what I was looking for. After a few weeks, he would just shake his head before I even walked through the door of the post office.

I was terrified. Back then, you didn’t have cell phones or internet. You couldn’t just look someone up. If a soldier stopped writing, you assumed the worst. I spent three months scanning the daily newspapers, my eyes burning as I read through the casualty lists, terrified I would see his name.