Posted in Fiction

#AtoZChallenge – Destructive

60 years later. Long after that small girl had grown into a woman, a series of destructive experiences threatened to overtake her life. She’d had a good, full, eventful life. A good husband, more than one challenging and fulfilling career, wonderful friends, some supportive family. There were cousins who were like siblings. There had been disagreements between the cousins as there are in every family. There was one special cousin to whom she’d felt bonded since childhood. This cousin hurt the now grown woman’s feelings badly, during a difficult and emotional period in her life. If any cousin would support her, she had thought this cousin would. She was wrong.

The two women had an argument when the woman expressed her feelings of hurt to her cousin. Weeks later, she received a letter in the mail. The cousin said she was “documenting” their disagreement. She read on with interest, not understanding. The cousin recounted their argument. During their argument, the cousin had mentioned some financial dealings they had with each other. The woman was shocked when she saw that this so-called documentation had been copied and mailed to other cousins in the family. Cousins who were no party to the argument. Why would her special cousin possibly involve other cousins? Bother them with a personal disagreement of which they had no knowledge? She was crushed and her heart was broken. It was the most vindictive thing that had ever happened to her.

She learned some valuable lessons that day. No matter how much you trust someone, even in your family, don’t open your heart to them. Don’t ever let family be involved in any of your financial affairs. Don’t let trust come easily.

The woman felt she lost her family that day. She would never be comfortable with them again.

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Posted in Fiction

#AtoZChallenge – Crushing

She made her way through Grades One and Two with the little girls. Her little sisters. The two families on the hill gave her pretty dresses for school and fixed her curls just so. She had two mothers and two fathers. She did the arithmetic, the reading, the piano. They thought she was special. She didn’t think about that. She didn’t know any other way.

Then the dark morning came. Her Daddy came to her bedside early. Not to wake her for school but to tell her he was leaving. He was going to take a job far away. She wouldn’t see him for a long time. She didn’t know what a long time meant, but she thought it sounded bad. The look on his face made her afraid. She started to cry and so did he. He reached into his pocket and found three pennies. He handed them to her and told her they were her lucky three pennies. That when she looked at them, she would know he would be back.

After that morning, her life changed forever, it seemed. Her Daddy was gone. She kept the three pennies in her hand always. At school, home, play. When she wrote, read, bathed, and ate. Her mother tried to get her to lay them down, but she knew she would lose her Daddy if she did. She didn’t lay them down and now, so many years later, they are in her jewelry box.

They were her lucky three pennies and she held onto them and waited for her Daddy to come home. She wasn’t special anymore. She would never feel special again after the Dark Morning.

#theme: descriptive adjectives

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Posted in Fiction

#AtoZChallenge – Beloved

Before she was tutored and tested. When she was a baby and hardly more, she was beloved by the two familie on the hill. There were two other families that were also hers. A big extended family that sprouted from her roots on the farm in the country. Then the family in the north, her Daddy’s family, who spoke with a strange accent but who enveloped her in their love during the few times she saw them.

When she was only four years old, they visited the family in the north. A reunion her Daddy said. Not just her grandfather and aunts and uncles but great aunts and uncles and cousins. They sat in rocking chairs around the fireplace in the cabin by the lake and told stories of Sweden, the Old Country. She rocked on her grandfather’s lap and felt his big belly laughs. It was the first of only three times she saw him in her life but she was beloved by him and by all of them.

The women cooked on an old wood stove. Everyone ate, drank, fell asleep, and got up the next day and did it all again. They couldn’t get enough of each other. There was so much love in that cabin. She never felt that kind of love again.

At four years old, it was the last time she ever saw them all together, but she remembered it all her life.

#theme: descriptive adjectives

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