This is a map of Europe that can be used to show the locations we visited as children. We lived in France, in the Alsace-Lorraine area, which has moved between France and Germany throughout the history that these two countries have shared. It was an area that became the roadway during major wars.
The map will document where we drove in an old ’51 Ford and then in a ’57 Mercedes. We took road trips organized by our parents to museums, cathedrals, WWI & II cemeteries, battlefields, and castles. My mother always packed a food suitcase, and we often ate in old, empty houses that dotted the countryside if we found one. The buildings were strategically placed to store ammunition in WWII. I remember one along the Mediterranean where the wind blew so hard, we couldn’t even talk against it. These structures were not just for storage. I think they were also used for cover in battle.
Because I saw former battle fields and cemeteries from WWI and II as a child, remember cathedrals with scaffolding and in states of repair, and grew up in a family where Dag Hammarskjöld, the second secretary-general of the United Nations, was a household word, I become emotional about the War in Ukraine or when harsh words are spoken about NATO, as though the collective past can somehow be forgotten or erased. I feel the pain of a country at war in ways I cannot describe. Was it all of the cemeteries we saw? All of the sites of battles in the past? I don’t know, but I wish we could understand how a child’s education begins at a very young age. These hats can serve as a reference point for the pins, and by the end, I’ll note the sites discussed on the map.
These early memories have left a lasting impression.