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A quote: “Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.” ~~ Scott Adams
I’ll start with a story …
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I stood on Miss Ruthie’s porch holding a bag of peaches and a large slice of momma’s butter crumb coffeecake wrapped in waxed paper, wondering how I was going to knock on the door.
“Child, don’t just stand there the door is open. Just push.”
I put my shoulder to it and the door swung in, easy peasy. I stepped into cool shadows after the bright outside, stopping to let my eyes adjust.
I looked to my right, into the parlor, to see Miss Ruthie – hair a cloud of white hair over a pink scalp, a scarf of red roses tied at her neck. She held out her hands in welcome, “well step on in. You’re Stephie, right? MaryAnn’s little sister?”
“Yes, ma’am. Momma thought best I start visiting you afternoons now.”
Ruthie’s laugh shocked me. It was full, hearty and seemed more apt to one of daddy’s trucker friends, not this fragile bird woman.
“I don’t like tellin’ stories outside of school, Stephie, but your sister was one pain in my … side. Now pick your jaw up off the floor, I know you think the same. Come on, child. Let’s make tea and I’ll split that coffeecake with you.”
I got the feeling right then and there I had me a new friend.
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Now it’s your turn.
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.featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
John Gaillard says: A few months ago I met a lady that has changed me to be a better person. She always greets me with a smile and a nice greeting even when she may be having a bad day. She is unshakeable when it comes to providing for and caring for her family. That is what impressed me most about her. Her children come first and she works tirelessly to make that happen. No amount of pressure at her job seems to shake her. She breezes through it like it is nothing and keeps a smile on her face. She is a single Mom but she approaches the task with unmeasurable tenacity. It is unimaginable how she is able to manage it all.
But, she can be sassy whenever she needs to be . She is a special person and my best female friend. And will be forever.
Fletch says: She sits in her wheelchair, dreaming away the hours. Sometimes a telemarketer calls and she doesn’t mind because she likes to visit. Her family has moved to Florida and now no one comes to visit and no one rings the bell. Life has become a succession of long days stretched out. No one remembers what she once was and will be again.
Once Upon a time she’s taught Sunday school at the First Congregational Church. She didn’t understand all the Bible stories herself, but nonetheless she told the children about David fighting Goliath and of Daniel spending a night in the lion’s den.
And during the years of her youth, the kindness of those stories settled into her bones until she became part of those stories herself. She became part of the story when she took a jar of strawberry preserves down to the nursing home. She became part of the story when she helped the little boy next door do his math problems, which were very hard.
And that kindness of years ago lives on. Something stirs within the spirit of this withered crone trapped in her wheelchair with a voice that cracks when she tries to sing. But some day is coming, and in that someday that long ago kindness will live on. For it is that kindness that survives and not the withered body that falls away and is left behind.
So she sits her days in this wheel chair and no one knows that it is one of the queens of heaven sitting there.
When Jayden was in his teens, his parents had sent him to spend summers with his grandmother in a small town in southern Illinois. He’d hated leaving the bright lights of the big city, but now that he was older, he understood their reasoning — not just to get him away from people they perceived as bad companions, but to get him to see a vanishing way of life very different from Chicago and its suburbs.
In the evening Grandma would sit in a rocking chair on her porch, which was shaded by trees and flowering bushes, until the shadows grew long and the light at the corner came on. If none of the neighbors came over to visit, she might read, or she might tell Jayden about the days when the town was bustling with life.
When she’d been a little girl, there’d been a farmstead or two on every country road, but some of them were already occupied by tenants who had jobs elsewhere, because farms were already getting bigger. By the time she was in high school, many of those farmsteads had vanished altogether, maybe leaving a wellhead, an old windmill, or a dilapidated barn where a farmer might park grain wagons. In time even those vanished, the ground being more valuable under tillage.
And the small town where she lived had undergone a similar shrinkage. When they went out on errands together, she’d point out where childhood friends’ homes had once been, along with the school buildings and the old town hall. Then they’d come back to go through the photo albums that had belonged to her parents and grandparents, showing a time when there was still a general store, a gas station, even a little restaurant just off the highway, where the farmers would go to chew the fat on winter days when they didn’t have any work to do.
By the time Jayden was visiting, a single farmer handled the acreage that once kept a dozen farm families busy, working the land with tractors and implements that had made their counterparts from Grandma’s childhood look like toys. So there just wasn’t the call for so many businesses to support them any more, although the grain elevator remained, albeit without the railroad line that had once brought unit trains of hopper cars to take away the grain.
Jayden had enlisted in the Army right out of high school, and his grandmother had gone on to her reward while he was in the Middle East. He’d come back to visit the cemetery where she and Grandpa had been laid to rest alongside Grandpa’s parents, grandparents and cousins of varying degrees. Then he’d headed out west to take a job with a cybersecurity company in Silicon Valley.
As he grew older, he’d come to wish that he’s paid more attention to Grandma’s stories of her youth, of the thriving community and a vanishing way of life.
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