There is a forest, mere blocks from my new doorstep, with a rich canopy of trees watching over winding grounds of lives gone by. The roots of these trees run deep in the soil here, in this place they call The Presidio––1,491 acres of hilly pathways and forests that served as a military base for 218 years before being determined a National Historic Landmark in 1994. It was here, way back in 1948, that my grandmother Marjorie Ruth Samson first met my grandfather Hal Schroeder. She, a young 2nd Lt. in the Army Nurse Corps, met he, a dashing Army officer, while reviving him from illness at the Letterman Army Hospital. The pair later eloped to Switzerland.
Upon re-visiting this forest, the breeze breathes gently amongst the trees, and I am embraced by the romance of this transformative landscape––gaining strength in my solitude, and the faint ancestral whispers of my past.
