The Seventy Second Story

Looking out the window as we were landing in Florida, there was an egret, enormous and white, floating along outside my window for a very long moment. It was as though he was guiding us in; some sort of divine tugboat so gloriously graceful that he needn't a rope to pull us behind him.

the fifty second story

When I was 9 years old, we were moving away from Florida. My mom wanted us to wake up early enough to see the sun rise over the water, and to look for turtle nests hatching. We were too late for the turtles, but there was one little one that wasn't making it past the breakers. My mom carried it out, but it washed back up, anyway. We took it to the turtle rescue place, and they told us that its flippers had been chewed by crabs and it wouldn't be able to swim, but they would send it to the aquarium, and it would get prosthetics. I believed them. I believed them until I was telling this story, not more than a year ago, and got to the point of saying the thing about prosthetic flippers and realized, all those years later, that it was almost certainly a lie you tell to children.

the thirty eighth story

takes place right after the thirty seventh. In the end, we did not have what I would, as an adult, call snow. We had an icy covering on the grass, with maybe some hail pellets to make it look a little white. My brother and I, htough, were snow kids. We loved the snow. We loved snow men, and sledding, and the whole deal. Sadly, in addition to not having real snow, we also didn't have hills. My grandfather was in town, though, and while I have a lot of negative memories of that grandfather, this was one of those times when he put aside being an asshole for long enough to be one of the awesomest people on earth. He got my brother and I to put on our snowsuits, walked us down to the park, and spent the entire rest of the day- many hours- all the way to full dark- pulling as around the flat park in our sled. It couldn't have been any easier to pull than it would have been on a summer's day, but we were calling it snow, and wanted to go sledding on it, so he did it. It was fantastic.

the thirty seventh story

I was born in rural PA, but we moved to Florida when I was four. I missed the snow something fierce. The following winter, when I was in kindergarten, we got snow flurries. This had never happened. My teacher took us all out into the hallway, to  a big picture window, to watch the snow. I promptly walked back into the classroom, grabbed my (bright pink, faux) fur coat. Imagine, if you will, the tiniest girl in the class, the shy one who has to be badgered to so much as participate in saying the ABCs out loud with the class, and now imagine this bitty thing marching up to her teacher and announcing that she is going out to play in the snow. At first my teacher said no- school policy was not to let the kids out in the snow, for fear of colds. I held up my (pink faux) fur coat. Then she pointed out that she had to have her eye on the whole class, and couldn't let me out by myself, nor could she leave the class alone. I promised to stay by the window where she could see me. And then I walked past her, out the door, and caught snowflakes on my tongue while trying to make snow angels in a flurry.

The Twenty Sixth Story

I guess this will be the pattern. I'll forget to check google+ for weeks (months) at a time, but when I remember, I'll post a new story almost everyday. Then I'll forget again.
This is the story of the duck who couldn't swim. It is from when I was VERY young; probably first grade, maybe second. My brother and I both weren't going to school at the time, and in between lessons, mom would take us down to the park. There were lots of ducks at the park, and I would run around like a mad thing trying to pet all the ducklings. There would often be one female duck with ridiculous numbers of ducklings. Presumably, none of the ducks counted their fluffballs, and when a fluffball saw a bunch of other fluffballs it figured that was were it was supposed to go. There was a downside to this, though. Ducklings don't produce oils of their own- the mother duck preens her chicks and imparts waterproofing when she does. With that many chicks, she can't preen them all. My brother and I found ourselves standing on shore, watching a duckling sink. We had no idea WHY the duckling was sinking, we only knew that it was. We called mom over, pointing at the floundering duckling; being who she is, without even stopping she walked right into the pond in the middle of the park, swam out to the duckling, and brought him back to shore. She didn't know why he couldn't swim, either. We let him rest and then put him back in the shallows, keeping a close eye. He clearly wasn't gonna make it, so we brought him home. Our cat had kittens at the time, and the little duckling did his best to keep up with them (after all, they were also fluffballs, maybe they were just really strange ducklings?). Mom, of course, was calling around trying to figure out what to do with a stray duck. Eventually she found a bird rehab place, where we continued to volunteer one day week until re-enrolling in actual school.