I tend to notice very tiny sounds that most other people miss. It is mostly annoying since I can get distracted by the oven turning off in another room. But it came in handy one time.

I am out camping with my girlfriend and a couple of friends when I notice that something is off. I perk my head, shush everyone else chatting around the campfire, and listen intently.

Girlfriend: “What is it?”

Me: “I hear something.”

Friend #1: “What? A bird?”

Me: “Um… A voice in the wind?”

Friend #2: *Snickers* “A voice in the wind? What have I told you about accepting strange rings from old men?”

Me: *Giggles* “Yeah, but… it sounds like crying. Like a sobbing child?”

Everyone listens, but only I hear it. 

Friend #1: “It could be a fox? They sound like crying children sometimes.”

Me: “No… No, I can’t tell you why, but… it sounds like a child? Look, I have to check it out. You know how I am.”

Girlfriend: “Of course! I’ll come with you.”

We head off in the direction I think it’s coming from. My girlfriend starts to hear it after a couple of hundred meters. She runs back to tell the others. We all head off in that direction, the jokes about evil forest goblins and hulders that want to kill us all dying off quickly. Since it is June in the north of Sweden, it is light even at night, so it is easy to find the way, but we are constantly attacked by swarms of mosquitos. But the sound gets louder.

We find a little girl, probably aged four or five covered in mosquito bites, sitting on a stump. She is wearing one shoe and a pretty dress that is tattered, stained, and torn up. She is bawling her eyes out and looks at us with great fright. I rush over and pick her up.

Me: “Hey, hey, there, there. What are you doing here?”

She sniffles. 

Me: “You seem lost. Are you?”

Girl: *With a tiny nod* “Yes.”

Me: “Poor thing! Let’s help you get home.”

We carried her back to camp, asked her name, told her ours, put her in a sleeping bag next to a new campfire, and gave her a mug of hot chocolate and a sandwich. She quickly fell asleep with a tiny smile. We called the police, meanwhile, to tell them that we’d found her, and we gave them GPS coordinates to our position. The girl’s parents called us, and we decided to meet next to a road the next morning since it wasn’t easy to get to us and we were several hours from the road.

We carried the girl out of the forest the next morning and handed her over to the most grateful parents I have ever seen. They were beside themselves with relief. The police took a statement, and then they all headed off to a hospital to make sure everything was all right. The girl had developed a fever, probably due to all the mosquito bites, and was obviously a bit dehydrated and hungry. The parents got in touch later and invited us to a fika (a Swedish custom) to properly thank us and fill us in on what had happened.

The girl had slunk away during a family party next to the forest to look at a pretty bird and followed it a bit deeper into the woods. Then, she stepped on a viper on her way back — but it didn’t bite her. She panicked and ran randomly until she got completely lost. She had probably been lost for at least ten hours, she had lost her shoe in a mire, and she had accidentally wandered very far away from civilization — the only direction that had literally no other humans for dozens of kilometers.

The girl was completely fine now, after about two weeks, and had drawn a little picture of us in the forest that still hangs on my fridge. She was very afraid of the woods now, but she and her dad would go camping in a glen close to the house to make her feel safe again. I’m still friends with the family, and we visit each other from time to time.

I still think about what might’ve happened if I hadn’t followed my instinct to check on the voice in the wind.

When I was a teenager and didn’t have quite all my common sense in place yet, my uncle was hosting a BIG party because a notable family member was turning eighty. Once the house was fully prepared, I thought that the best way to distract the kiddos and get all their wiggles out was to play my Tossing Game with them.

In the back room, I put a mattress on the floor, piled all the pillows in the house on top, and one at a time began to spin each toddler cousin, nephew, and assorted hanger-on in a big circle going, “One… two… three!”, before throwing them into the pile.

The kiddos love the Tossing Game. They’d crash, clamber out, and jump right back in line for another turn.

It took me a while to realise that there were suddenly MORE kids than I remembered throwing. Like, a lot more. Guests had started to arrive, and every. Single. Little. Kid. Immediately found their way to the back room to join in. I’d gone from seven to twenty-one.

Now, it took a bit, but then Teenager [Me] realised that maybe throwing STRANGERS’ kids might be a problem.

To solve this, I promptly went out of the back room with the gaggle of twenty toddlers to loudly ask the party at large:

Me: “Hey, is it okay if I throw your kids at a wall?”

At that point, the eighty-year-old guest of honour decided that rather than socialising with all his friends, HE’D like to throw the kids at the wall, too, thanks.

This was during the global health crisis. I was (and still am) living with my grandparents, and due to life difficulties that are outside the scope of this story, dependent on them. I had come out to them as nonbinary a year before, and though it confused them, it was never in a way they refused to accept.

No better was this shown than during this story.

I’m a walking bane to chargers and earbuds and am regularly forced to ask my grandparents to buy me more. I don’t know why; I’m not even rough with them! But anyway, after I asked for one, I popped into their Amazon account just to see how long it would take to arrive.

What I saw in addition was a mask. It was not just any mask; it had “THEY/THEM” emblazoned proudly on the front, in the colors of the nonbinary flag.

I hadn’t asked for it. They had meant to surprise me with this.

I broke the news that I’d found out when I got it, and they were a little disappointed, but I wore it everywhere while masks were still necessary.

If you take any moral away from this story, it’s that anyone can be accepting of identities — even grandparents who are over seventy years old.

My coworker announced that she was pregnant with her third child. This would be my first time working with her while she was pregnant, so when the discussion came about whether we should pool together our money for some baby gifts, I was excited and was all in. We also decided to turn it into a small party, and we would each make a dish for lunch.

The tricky part of this is my coworker is allergic to many things — dairy, gluten, shellfish, tree nuts, tomatoes, certain fruits, and many more things. We have talked about her allergies before when discussing what to get for takeout lunches, but we hadn’t committed the list to memory. Over the course of two or three weeks, we would try to have her allergies naturally come into conversation, and someone not talking to her would write down the good foods and the bad foods. When we were pretty confident that we had gotten enough, we shared the list with everyone in the office.

The day of the party arrived, and we set up the table while my coworker was on her morning break. When she came back, we led her to the table, and she was surprised by all of the gifts. Once she opened the gifts, we started to bring out lunch. We went around the room explaining our dishes and what ingredients were included and/or excluded. She realized we had all made the dishes specifically to fit with her diet, and she burst into tears, saying that it was one of the nicest things that had happened to her.

It was a rewarding feeling, to be able to do something so small as make lunch for someone and get that reaction.

Going forward, we don’t make everything without her allergens, but we do make sure there are at least a few dishes she can have, and we prevent cross-contamination whenever possible.

My dad was a mechanic at a small shop in a small town in the early 1950s. One day, two women pulled in with a poorly running car.

Woman #1: “We’ve stopped at two different shops, and both of them told us we need a complete overhaul.”

Woman #2: “We can’t wait. Our husbands are on leave from the military and we’re on our way to meet them. It’s a two-hour trip. Is there anything that can be done to keep the car running?”

Dad had diagnosed the problem as they pulled in. The car was still running as he opened the hood and put the spark plug wire back on. The engine leveled out and was running perfectly.

When Dad refused payment, they put a five-dollar bill (a huge tip back then) on the counter, thanked him profusely, and left.