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Prologue
I was a small boy in the 1950s, and my grandmother often walked me through our little town and showed me the houses where soldiers had lived until the day that they left their parents for the Second World War, many of them taller than their fathers by then, but still young enough for the town to recall them as their mother's little boys. They left mostly modest walk-up row houses, joined at the shoulders, with windows facing the street. And in those days of the war, mothers hung small flags in the windows with a blue star for each son who was serving. When one of these sons died, a gold star was sewn over the blue one, and my grandmother would walk in her flower print dress to the mother's house with a casserole or a pie and sit and talk with her, mostly just listening. And as she listened, she began to dream about the boys who had left this little town, never believing they would not return, and of the boys who made it back home to father a vast new generation of babies, with a look in their eyes like they wanted to get started in the next five minutes. Those soldiers, the lucky ones, came home and married their sweethearts and started having babies as fast as they could, and my grandmother believed that each time one of those babies was born, the soul that inhabited it came from one of the dead soldiers, so that those boys who had died so far from home got to live again in the town where they had grown up, the town they had left for the war. And all their lives, these children of the next generation inhabited by the souls of the dead soldiers would run through the quiet tree-lined streets playing, and later would park their cars outside the movie theatre, with the strange sense of familiarity, the sense that they had been here before and that all of this was happening to them once again.
REVIEWS
FREDERICKSBURG.COM
"With a long record of kudos for his writing, including from Oprah Winfrey, and Hollywood bringing an earlier book to the big screen, Snyder's credentials are strong and manifested in this book that lends itself to one sitting.
"The Winter Travelers" offers a story that serves both as a reminder of what we mean in others' lives and as a thoughtful diversion in a busy season."
DISCUSSIONS
Down East Books | 160 pages | ISBN 978-0892729227 | October 16, 2011
THE WINTER TRAVELERS
A Christmas Fable
