I’m in the room reading a book while my five-year-old niece is on a Zoom call with her kindergarten class. Her teacher is asking her students for ways to keep the Earth clean because it’s Earth Day.
All of a sudden, I hear one little boy go, “Shave your grass!”
He meant “mow the lawn,” but I am definitely using his phrasing from now on.
I turned on Hulu and it needed the password, so I typed it in. It said my password was incorrect, so I tried it again. It was still incorrect, so I asked my mom, who pays for the service and shares it between two houses, if the password was changed. She said no. She asked my stepdad, who is an expert at this stuff, why the password wouldn’t work. He scoffed and said, “I changed it. She can pay for her own.”
I was stunned, because he’d never done anything like this before. My mom got angry and started yelling at him, saying he had no right and she’s the one who pays for the service, etcetera.
My stepdad finally said he’d been looking for a reason to throw me out of the house, and he thought this would do it. He was the one who wound up getting thrown out of the house. Due to this and several other recent incidents, my mom is now filing for divorce.
This story is from when I am very young, probably three or four years old. My family is on vacation to Mackinac Island, an island in Lake Huron. One of the things the island is most famous for is its fudge, and at least for my family, it is an unwritten law that whenever we visit, we have to get at least two kinds of fudge.
We’re in the middle of a confectionary that sells mostly fudge. It’s crowded, given that it’s the height of the tourist season, and the line is so long that my parents let me stand by the glass barrier that separates the shop into the main area and the kitchen so I can watch a handful of workers cutting up huge slabs of fresh fudge while we wait for my parents to get to the front of the line.
I’m completely engrossed by the process, even though I’m not really tall enough to see more than what’s on the table right in front of me.
One of the workers notices how closely I’m watching what’s happening and silently gives me a small piece of soft chocolate fudge from the trimmings. To my three- or four-year-old self, this is the absolute best thing that has ever happened to me.
I don’t stop smiling for hours even after I eat the fudge.
If you’re out there, kind fudge shop worker, thank you. I’ve been to Mackinac Island a few more times since, and every time I think of you and that little piece of fudge.
This story was included in our May 2020 Inspirational Roundup.
It is spring 2004. A species of cicada emerges as adults every seventeen years in the Washington, DC area — DC, Northern Virginia, and Maryland.
They are everywhere: trees, buildings, roads. And they make an eerie sound because of the billions of them that are trying to find a mate at the same time. When they emerge, they come out of the ground in their nymph stage, dry out, and then molt their exoskeleton one last time. Once they’ve mated, they lay their eggs in the outer twig-like branches of trees. In doing so, the egg takes its nutrition from the tree, killing off the outer twelve inches or so of every branch of the tree.
So, all of the Hitchcockian effects of this insect: little mounds of dirt where each cicada emerges, discarded exoskeletons, cicadas flying everywhere, eerie sound, and many trees’ outer branches dying off.
During this time, I’ve headed to my daughter’s preschool, which is a Montessori school. They’ve taken it upon themselves to make this Biblical insect plague a teachable moment. I’m walking up to the front of the school to check my daughter out for the day. I hear the playful squeals of kids in the back playground. But one little girl, about four years old, is standing out front, looking intently at something in her hands.
The girl holds up her hands to me, showing me the dried leaving of a cicada’s molt, and says, “Look, mister. An exo-skeleton!”
“Why yes,” I say. “That’s exactly right!”
It’s great that instead of being afraid, this girl and all her classmates now have a better appreciation of nature.
This story was featured in our May 2020 roundup!
I was in hospital for a severe illness. Because doctors were unable to identify what was causing it at my age, given I was in my twenties, I was in a ward for many weeks while they did multiple tests.
Being a fairly active person prior, I didn’t take sitting idle very well. So, after a few days, I was restless, despite being unwell.
I really enjoy crafty activities. The hospital happened to be holding an in-house competition where each individual ward got a theme, with the best decorated getting a prize.
Being absolutely bored out of my mind, I asked if I could help them out with making decorations, which they agreed to. They provided the crafting gear and paints, and we made some pretty cool decorations.
However, I will never forget the poor cleaners that came to do their rounds through the ward one afternoon and found me cross-legged on my bed, arms and gown covered in red paint, because I had dropped a large painted piece of decoration on myself.
One emergency call to nurses later, and I ended up not doing most of the painting activities following that.
That ward won the competition, and after an emergency surgery, I’m doing much better.
