I almost missed seeing it, but I glanced over to Lily, the teen foster girl seated at the kitchen table next to me. The current group at the emergency shelter was finishing eating their dessert—two scoops of ice cream. Lily grimaced as she took a bite of the chocolate ice cream. Her response was in sharp contrast to her delight over the vanilla scoop.
“I can do it, I can do it!”
Those were my exact words, directed to my dad as a child, while I stood clenching a fishing rod, on the bank of a lake in the Rocky Mountains. I’d watched my dad’s technique so many times I was sure I could cast into the lake and catch a big trout.
How easy is it to release a suitcase onto the conveyor belt at a busy airport check-in counter with the possibility of never seeing it again? Airport baggage handlers are trained and responsible to correctly tag luggage for airline flights, but there are no guarantees that suitcases will travel on the same flight and be available to reclaim on the other end.
I had no idea what to do with all the little bags that just kept appearing after every trip. Each draw-string bag contained smooth colorful stones my husband selected from bins in souvenir shops. I usually remind him that the stones do not necessarily come from that area but a distributor supplies them to the stores.
I watch it over and over and laugh each time. It’s a video of my son-in-law on his four-wheeler dragging a long rope attached to a small plastic swimming pool. Round and round they go over fields of last year’s freshly fallen snow.
No one said anything. They just pretended it didn’t happen.
My friend had suffered her second miscarriage in six months. Devastated, she felt her dreams of motherhood fading away.
I don’t think I’ll ever have children. I don’t deserve to be a mother.
I looked over at my friend. She dropped her head, tears filling her eyes.
After the funeral, we all converged at my uncle’s house. Casseroles lined the counter. Dishes filled the sink. He’d become accustomed to cleaning up the kitchen since my aunt had gotten sick. As he started covering bowls with aluminum foil, he recounted the last few hours of her life.
I knew something was wrong before I started bleeding. I hadn’t felt as “pregnant” as I did the previous two times, but I had no choice but to wait and see. When the spotting started, I knew it was the beginning of the end.
I sank into the overstuffed rocker and massaged my throbbing forehead.
As a young wife and mother, I thought I had the perfect blueprint for our family. My intention was to have two children. No more. Within a few years we had two wonderful little boys. When I learned that I was expecting baby number three, I was extremely upset.
In the days before HGTV revealed the intricacies of home decorating, I naively decided to redo the wallpaper in our bathroom myself. Why hire a professional when I could do it, right? Little did I know how tricky it would be to remove the existing paper or how tired I would become before finishing the project.
I sat down to read and turned on the table lamp beside me. As light spread across the table, I saw a fine white powder coated its surface and even the books resting there.
The annual Easter egg hunt for our seven young grandchildren had just ended. In the kitchen I was busy preparing our big, midday meal.
When I looked up I found myself on the wrong side of the road, in the wrong lane. It scared me half to death.
After teaching all day, I would come home famished. I would snack and snack to try and find just the right food to ease my hunger and tiredness. Moving from one food to the next, nothing seemed to help.
“Are you sure that you’re sure?” My oldest daughter had been to her first city-wide Youth Revival. After hearing the preacher ask several times if they would go to heaven when they died, she came home with questions.
“Do you make decisions easily?” That question stared me in the face and caused me to pause. I had not stumbled over any of the other questions on the personality assessment. The rest just seemed so easy and the answers quite obvious. So why this one?
My eyes teared up as the special needs young man stepped to the podium and began to pray. His eloquence and passion shone through the simple words he used.
