Eight Random Facts

I've been tagged by Joyful Woman, author of the best blog I've ever read. I'm to write eight random facts about myself, then tag eight others to write their own list of facts. So here are eight things about me that I sometimes find amazing:

1. I have climbed all the major peaks in Southern California: San Jacinto, Mount Baldy, San Gorgonio, San Bernardino, Whitney, Half Dome, etc. Since putting on middle-age poundage I haven't been able to climb, but I very much want to start hiking these again.

2. One of my early ambitions was to own and operate an orphanage in Mexico. It seemed that being a nurse and therapist, I should be well equipped to do this. Although my ideas have changed--both about this as an interest and my ability to run an orphanage--I remain captivated and warmly attracted to children of Hispanic descent. I would adopt several if I had the opportunity and means.

3. I have the perception of myself as being inarticulate, stammering, and incapable--of being a complete blank when asked questions. This makes me second guess myself quite frequently.

4. I have lived in eight states and traveled to twelve countries outside of the United States. I would go back to five of them to live in a heartbeat: Ireland, Switzerland, France, Holland, and Belgium.

5. Baking bread is therapeutic for me. A happy break from work and life's exigencies would be a week of baking.

6. A guiding principle of my life is that I am responsible for doing the right thing--regardless of whether it feels good, pays off, or improves my situation. This is not an easy belief system, but as the moral of a bedtime story reads, "I can sleep on stormy nights" because my conscience is clear. Most of the time.

7. Nothing could induced me to ever go down into the ground inside of a cave. I feel claustrophobic even thinking about it!

8. I collect blue and white pitchers and teapots.

Now, there are eight isolated, random facts about me. I don't have people to tag at this point, so the readers are welcome to list their own eight random facts, since I'd love to hear about you.

Not just for the birds

Found here

I just returned from Upstate New York, having gone back to pack up my mother, sell the house, and drive her across country to live with me in the West. It was all done in 11 days. I am tired but relieved that we are done with it all.

Something I noticed while I was home was the huge number of tree and barn swallows. They were everywhere. Up the road from our friend's home, on the telephone wires winding past the barn, hundreds of swallows sat shoulder to shoulder facing the sun. From time to time, one or another would swoop off the wire and down after gnats or bugs high in the air. Walking past them, I could hear their excited high pitched chirping to each other. Barnyard gossips. Adolescent daredevils and

show-offs. But close together and seemingly unhappy unless they could be in close proximity to another bird relative.

I looked for them every time I drove up that road. I was not disappointed.

I had forgotten all about barn swallows and how much I love them, living in a climate that is hostile to so many living creatures--hot, hot, hot, and very urban. Life here has become the norm and my memories of home and the sweet charm of these feathered busy bodies had faded. Until I drove down Delaney Road. There they were, lined up on the wire. Some were swooping past the car window, their wings making little whirring sounds. I remembered Pete and Sally, our little visitors who made a nest on our back porch one year. The barn across our road had come down and they needed a new place to raise a family. We were delighted to come home one day to hear their high-pitched chatter and see them up in the eaves outside our kitchen

window. There, three little swallows hatched, and three little blue bald heads poked up over the edge of the nest. We watched with delight, for several weeks, while their feathers grew and they took their first fluttery flights across the porch. We had to keep Tiger the cat inside for those days. Finally, they all flew away for the winter season and all was quiet in the snowy weather.

I thought a lot about these little birds over the last two weeks. It was a very sad trip to make. Mother simply can't live in that old house alone any longer. It is not possible for her to chop the wood and carry it in for the woodstove in the kitchen. Her legs are too short and nerves too frazzled to drive the lawnmower. The snow is too deep for her to drive in, leaving her isolated most of the winter. She can't endure being alone without my father, her late companion of 56 years. So we had to sell the family home.

The schedule was frantic--I hit the ground running when I arrived in New York--packing up a number of boxes that day, even after being on a red-eye flight all night. The entire four-bedroom house had to be packed up, in addition to the garage and storage building, plus a basement full of canned fruit and vegetables. The whole time however, there were friends and family filling boxes, dissembling model train tracks, packing the truck, keeping Mother occupied. We stayed with our friends the last two nights and enjoyed their superb cooking, games of Triaminoes, and many laughs. My cousins dissembled model train tracks and cleared an intolerable hobby room. Charlie and Glendon emptied the house and garage of all items that could possibly be sold at a yard sale they are holding for us. Lois prayed the whole time for us from across country. All that was done could never have been accomplished without them. We worked as a team, chattering and laughing as we went.

I felt truly held up and supported from all directions. It reminded me of those hundreds of barn swallows, snuggled together on the telephone wires. Life is truly best when we lean into others who understand us, and face the brightness. It's a lesson I hope never to forget.

I will be back in July.
Stay tuned.

Low Tide

Our faculty hosted a dinner last evening for our graduates and their families. There were wonderful tributes given by husbands, mothers, and sisters--and plenty of tears to go around. We faculty mingled. It was one of the few times I haven't wanted to drop out of sight when faced with such a task. Most of the students were known to me and seeing them with their families created the context that made sense of many things.

There was a slide presentation with pictures of all sorts of funny scenes. People loved it.

Then I sang.

It's not that I was nervous, because I rarely get nervous when I sing. The students didn't know I could sing but they had heard I knew how to sing, yada yada. It just happened that I was wearing a pair of pantyhose that I picked up on a sale table. The color was perfect, there was no reinforced toe thickness to show through my open-toed shoes, and they were control top. By all counts, they should have been the perfect accompaniament to my outfit.

When I pulled them on, they felt odd. They fit oddly around the waist and seemed to be lacking in elasticity or something. I gave them an extra tug to keep them in the right place. It is not unusual to have pantyhose feel catywhompus, and these were no exception. At least I hadn't pulled on them so hard that my fingers went right through them.

By the time I got to the dinner venue, the pantyhose had rolled down to my hip bones. Getting out of the car, I tried serreptitiously to yank them back up while greeting students coming alongside the back of the car. "Oh, hi Marilyn!" I yelled, hauling up the waistband as I held my very large purse in front of my stomach. "Did you see the sign at the front door?" I asked. They turned to look and I dropped my purse on the front seat of the car. With both hands I pulled on the waistband while they looked confusedly toward the building, the opposite direction.

In the door I went, and straight to the ladies room. By this time, my pantyhose were not only starting to slide to parts unknown, but so was everything else. A few moments of adjusting and pulling in the bathroom stall restored order down below. Back out into the auditorium I went, clutching my purse over my errant waistband.

It only seemed appropriate that I move from table to table, greeting family members and hugging students. Every step, every grasp, every moment, my pantyhose slid a bit farther down. One girl leaped out of her chair and clasped me to her for some minutes, whispering her thanks to me for helping her get through her studies. I was focusing on something sliding down over my bottom at that moment. I only hope that when she let go of me and looked into my face, she saw compassion and warmth, and not the panic and horror that I was feeling about my impending humiliation.

Feeling as though I should walk knock-kneed, so as to keep my pantyhose from rolling clear to my ankles, I minced back over to the table where I was to sit. As I smoothed my dress over my lap, a rolled up linear wad of cloth was apparent. I scooted my chair closer to the table, hoping that the tablecloth would cover it. I couldn't exactly eat with one hand doing a tug-of-war, but God forbid if it rolled any lower. I had to get up in front and sing at some point!

As the program progressed, we heard from string players, a poet, and the chair of the department handed out awards. Every few minutes, while people were clapping and looking elsewhere, the pantyhose got another tug northward. By the time our table was dismissed to go to the buffet line, I had been able to rearrange things to almost normal. That was a major victory. Perhaps it would be over.

Reaching for the salad at the buffet, it all started to slide again. What in the world did I have on down there? I managed to get back to the table and got started on my lassagna. It was good food, good conversation, good feelings. I forgot all about my little secret. Then my student announced that I would be singing for them.

Standing up was agony, because what had been at the cusp of trouble immediately became a bad situation. Walking up to the front of the room, everything shifted about 10 inches lower. I felt like I was in slow motion. The words of the song, Amazing Grace, came out of my mouth. I could look out into the crowd and see familiar faces, but I couldn't really focus on much. Something was sliding down over my bottom again, I realized with a sickening pang. All of it was sliding down, down, down. I wondered if my pantyhose would start to sag and wrinkle around my knees. Fortunately, my dress came to just below my knees and it wasn't clingy. But it wouldn't keep people from seeing the tide going out. Rolled into my pantyhose was the elastic from my underwear, and in one undulating movement, all was on the skids. Feeling drafty where I typically didn't feel a draft, I realized that there was potential that these good folks would know more about me than any of them cared to know in about five minutes if I stayed up front.

I'm not sure how I got through that song, but I did. Mincing back to my seat, all that mattered was that I could get there, and then to the bathroom to put everything in place once again. Why was this happening? I'd never had such a defective pair of pantyhose.

Long story short, I never did manage to get into the bathroom afterward, but was carried along with the crowd out to my car. I found that by taking large steps I could prevent everything from rolling any further down my thighs, which was where things were at this point. I just about made it to my car, feeling like a goose-stepping woman on a mission, when one little student came rushing toward me. "Thank you doct, for the flowers!" he said, hugging me. Something deep in my layers of clothing went ping! as I reached for him. I suddenly felt breezy under my dress in an alarming way. Oh Lord, don't let me be humiliated right here. It was a brief moment, and I was quickly in the car, driving away. Every bit of decency I had was rolled together and clung to me about six inches above my knees. I had made it to the car just in time.

As I pulled up into the driveway, Sam was just taking a load of clothes out of the drier. I drove inside and closed the garage door immediately. "Why did you do that?" he asked, clearly irritated that he'd have to climb around the car with the clothes basket to get into the house.
Getting out of the car, I turned my back to him and lifted up my dress. "That's why."
The moon rose early that night, in the garage on Butterland Avenue. No layer of "Town Taupe" could be seen.

Evangeline

This is a view of North Mill Pond--a sight that I grew up seeing every time we drove down the long hill through town, turning left to go to Daggett's store. On a road that went past the mill lived a family who were quite poor whose children attended our school. The boy in the family was someone that I didn't like--and now as an older person, I realize that it was all peer pressure. He liked me and because some alpha male in the school didn't like him, no one else was supposed to, either. Now I feel stricken about how we must have been to him.

But I loved his mother. She taught our primary class at church. There we'd sit in the basement of the church on our wooden pews, while she tried to help us memorize scripture. She always had pictures, stories, and really cool artistic things for us to do. She had a beautiful name--Evangeline. How perfect for her role in our young lives, too.

This dear lady was so poor, and she walked with her toes pointing outward at 45 degree angles from a straight line. She had a lisp and always looked tired. I don't remember what she wore, or what kind of car she drove. I only remember that she gave us her all in our class and that she really wanted us to know Jesus. I absolutely loved her.

One of the things she did to help us memorize scripture was to hold up pictures that indicated what the next verse in the chapter was. There are so many memories of us chanting Psalm 8, as a whole group of wiggly, uncertain nine-year-olds. I shall never forget Psalm 8, nor could I ever forget Evangeline, particularly when I think of North Mill Pond in front of her house.

O Lord, Our Lord

How excellent is Thy name in all the earth.

who hast set thy glory above the heavens.

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou

ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou

mightest still the enemy and the avenger.





When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy
fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast
ordained;


What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?



For thou hast made him a little lower than

the angels, and hast crowned him with glory

and honour.





Thou madest him to have dominion over the
works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:






All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;







The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and
whatsoever passeth through the paths of the
seas.

O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!

Out of the Mouth of Babes

It was at a British family's home one day after church. A group of rather distinguished personages were assembled for lunch, seated around a large table, laden with Indian food. The patriarch was holding forth about his time in Delhi while we all listened attentively to his very proper English diction. Other family members were from South Africa and the States. A beautiful little curly-headed blond child, Megan, about three years of age, eyed me across the table. She shyly smiled at me every time she caught my eye. As the adults' stories became too complex for her to follow, she began ducking down, plate level, to see if I was still looking at her--making eyes at me the whole time. Megan was delightfully flirtatious in the most wholesome, childlike way. I pushed around a fork-full of chutney hot enough to lift me straight up out of my chair. It was incredible that anyone could eat such a menu item. Besides, it was laced with putridly spiced raisins--foul on two accounts.
I was lost in fantasy about how to rid my plate of this noxious mixture unobtrusively, when I felt a gentle nudge at my elbow. Megan was leaning against me, like a cat in a barnyard. "May I please sit with you?" she asked, wide-eyed. Across the table, Mama squirmed. "Meggie, maybe the lady is trying to finish her meal. It might be best to wait."
Megan looked terribly disappointed and started to back away.
"Oh no," I said. "You sit right here on my lap. Will that be a good thing?"
She nodded vigorously and clammored up and settled on my knees, head against my chest. She was big enough to sit still and small enough to be able to hold her and still spoon food over her head into my mouth.
Megan leaned back against me, looking satisfied with herself.
The conversation turned from the patriarch's ventures to the younger brother's experience at work the day before. I mixed the chutney in with some rice to disguise it and pushed it to the side of my plate. Megan wiggled about, moving her head back and forth against me as if to find just the right place to lean.
Brother had just finished his anecdote and quiet reigned momentarily after the polite laughter subsided.
"Mama!" Megan exclaimed. "Barbara's boosies are much bigger than yours are! Did you know that?"
Now I knew why she was rolling her head back and forth across my chest. Mama was as red as a beet root, choking back her embarassment.
"No, Megan. I didn't know that." Looking at the hostess, she added without taking a breath, "Were you going to explain how to make this delightful chutney?"
There was muffled throat-clearning and chortling around the table as the hostess, who was partially deaf and hadn't heard the exchange about our "boosies," began her discussion of where to find the most nefarious admixture known to mankind.
Megan looked up into my face. "They are bigger" she said, still waiting for validation for her finding.
"I think you may be right" I whispered back. She smiled, satisfied and leaned back into me, fingering the tablecloth contentedly.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see our snowy-haired host regarding Megan, dabbing at his eyes, his glasses held in one hand and a huge smile on his face. "Lovely," he chortled. "Simply lovely!"

Stories

Found here

So you have now read six different accounts of the same story. If you were asked to tell the story, what would it be titled? Who would the main character be? What would the common thread be? Would you be able to come up with something that incorporated all the perspectives you read? Do you lean more toward one than another? Did you have a strong negative reaction to any part of one of the views? Is there a more true version of this story? If one view is true, are the other views untrue?

It has been said previously that our stories can be our prison. People typically find meaning in the occurrences that match their overarching, internal story. If a person feels less than worthwhile, then whatever happens will be seen through the lens of whether or not they have been validated or given approval. Many other features of the event will be overlooked because they are all about how other people treat them. Everything that happens is examined to see if their hypothesis about themselves is confirmed or disconfirmed. He wasn't respectful of me. I don't trust someone like her. I know something bad is going to happen at some point because of this. This is why some people's wounds devastate them and wreck their relationships for years to come. They have a real need for emotional connection and input, so they look everywhere for someone else affirm them. They are especially sensitive to what people say or do. Or they have become desensitized to bad behavior that they find themselves attached to a series of people who hurt them. Their story becomes the organizing principle around which they live their lives. Whatever story they hear, whatever event ensues, issues of belonging and connection are almost all that they attend to.

I know a woman who visits churches at times if she feels particularly blue. When I ask how she liked the sermon, or how she felt about the pastor's theology, or what the service was like, the only answer I get is, "I got so many hugs there!" and she tells one story after another about who hugged her, what they said, and how she felt about it. Can you guess what the story of her young life is? Sadly, it is no longer a story. It is who she has become.

We hear things differently, we perceive things different, and hence, we believe different things than someone else might. People who live in the same family often have different perspectives on what has happened, what the relationships mean, what constituted fair play, etc. Not only do we have different temperaments (that make us take note of different things), but we also have different lenses through which we view the world. Therefore, different people in a family can have quite varying opinions about things.

We see this in clinical work with families of people who have Alzheimer's disease. One family member may feel that their (senile) father is merely being difficult. Another member will recognize the degree of dementia for what it is. Still another may feel that the father needs to act demented just to tolerate life with his wife--and it goes on and on.

I well remember one Thursday afternoon, sitting in the classroom, listening to my professor drone on and on. Suddenly, one thing he said made me sit upright in my chair: "A good therapist isn't the one who sees what something means when it happens. A good therapist is someone who sees 100 things an event could mean, and who stays open to whichever one of those meanings, or another yet undiscovered meaning, it has for their client." We are not to assume only one possibility. We need to assume that the possibilities for meaning are endless, and entertain the idea that something can mean anything at all to someone else.

Here's an example: a couple came to me for therapy complaining that all they did was argue. It soon became evident that they had locked horns about which reality was the correct one. As long as the man bowed to his wife's interpretations, the conflict would blow over. But if he dared to assert that his reality was correct, she would just about come apart at the seams. We worked a long time together before they learned how to listen to the perspective of the other and recognize that each of their stories came from a deep place of the past. And when the other could acknowledge their perspective, they became less entrenched in testing the hypotheses that arose from that story in the here and now.

Stories are interesting, to say the very least.

View Six

Found here

Well, I'm Melanie. It happened to me. And I don't remember one bit of it. I was 17 months old according to the story. I grew up hearing that this was the event that God used to indicate what my future would be like. I felt really special and thrilled by hearing this story. I did get tired of hearing about it and having the tears and well-rehearsed narrative. But I think that the story created a context for who I was in God's sight: beloved, used of God, cheerful and someone who rose above the pain of life.

As I got older, I remember that I used to have this recurring, strange fantasy every time I sat down in front of my computer. It was like I'd get a flash of an image in my mind's eye of a deluge of water bursting out of the screen right at me. I'd fight the urge to duck down but realize it was only a mental picture that wasn't based on anything real.
There were other things about me that I wondered about. For example, I absolutely hate going to bed at night. It's not like I'm afraid or worried, or thinking about anything in particular. I just feel like I'm being punished, to have to be in a bed all alone and have no one else around. I used to argue with my mother about how I should be allowed to stay awake longer. I would do anything to stay awake. After my parents realized that even with lights out kinds of rules, I'd still get up and creep around upstairs in my room, they bought me a light for my headboard so I could read. It would just be my responsibility to get up on time in the morning. Nothing could have made me happier. I read voraciously at night with my door closed, mostly religious books. When I got into my 30s, my staying awake late was to the point of being ridiculous. Why sleep? I would be tired, but I'd fight and fight to stay awake. Why, on earth?

One day I was reading a book about the Chowchilla bus kidnapping. The author, a psychiatrist, described all the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder in children: grim, joyless, repetitive play; magical thinking; the sense of a foreshortened future; daytime fantasies involving something related to the trauma. I put down the book and called my mother. What really happened? Something much bigger than God using me had happened and I wanted to know what it was. Indeed, something much bigger had happened.

Mother told me that when I came home from the hospital, I was dazed and withdrawn for at least six months. That was the first time I had heard this, and I was 39! She said that it was hard to engage me emotionally and I seemed removed from what was going on around me. I asked if she ever considered taking me to the doctor or a psychiatrist or something. No. Back then, people only went to psychiatrists if they were a bona fide crazy person. "We just hoped that you'd get over it and we ignored it."

Why had she been running steaming water in a bathtub in a house with two children under the age of five? Had I been left alone in the hospital for any length of time? She said that I hadn't, but as we talked, I had vague recollection of being in a white enamel crib--one with a lid on it. I couldn't get out and I remember--in another flash-type memory--looking down a long empty corridor and wondering where everyone was and why I had to be there all alone. I must equate going to bed with being all alone in that crib. Why is it that so many people love to retreat to a nice, soft bed to drift in and out of sleep in the middle of an afternoon? I'd rather have my toenails pulled out with hot pincers! Why? Because it was reminiscent of being in pain, being alone, abandoned. Being in bed feels punishing and I avoid it.

What really stood out for me was the sense of a foreshortened future. I never could picture myself as a parent or teenager, or an adult. It was like there was no picture in my head of an older Melanie. Just a blank where the future should be. I even thought about this phenomenon when I was an preteen.

It's interesting too, that I found myself at one point in my life, taking care of injured babies. I would go completely nuts if I felt that the children were afraid or treated in less than a sensitive, attentive manner by the caretakers. My reaction seemed out of proportion to the event. There it was again. Heightened psychological and physiological arousal in response to a reminder of the traumatic event.
I had also heard somewhere that many very first memories in traumatized people are tied to traumatic events. What is my first memory of life (beside the flash-view of being in a crib with a lid on it)? It is of being held by my father, with my little bottom in his big hands, me leaning against his chest and his face against mine. He is lowering me down into the bathtub for the first time after I got home from the hospital. He was saying sweet, gentle things to me so I wouldn't get scared, and I was putting my feet in the water in the bathtub. I looked up and saw what seemed like a mile of white tiles on the wall. I wasn't afraid. I smelled Phisohex and heard his voice rumbling in his chest, against my back.

Oh.

I also had an exaggerated startle response, was hypervigilant, and quite anxious about a number of world events. When a person with PTSD doesn't get treatment, every other thing that causes anxiety piggybacks onto the original trauma, until their response to a frightening stimulus is extraordinary.

I read and re-read the book, thinking about myself, examining what I knew to be true about my responses to life. I had PTSD. That was what I came away from this story with. What I couldn't get over was how I'd been given "the party line" about God doing something wonderful through me. I've even told this story in sermons and church retreats. I do believe that God was very gracious and that I've learned from this story that one doesn't even need to be sensient in order to be used by God. Even the rocks will sing out if no one else praises God--if need be. So He used me--a tiny little 17-month old child. And I still got PTSD and my attachment and abandonment issues germinated in that traumatic event.

It is important to know the whole story or else someone will sell you a whitewashed version of it that somehow supports who they are, while ignoring the impact of it on you. Good thing I found out the truth about myself. It has made all the difference. You also can't let something define you that you know nothing about and that you don't remember. Get out there and make your life what you want it to be. Be defined by what you do and how you treat other people. You just can't rest on the definitions of life or yourself that other people give you.

View Five

I grew up hearing the story of what happened to Melanie. She is four years older than I am, and I wasn't even a gleam in my parent's eyes. In fact, my mother was pregnant with a baby when my sister was burned. If she hadn't lost the baby, I'd never have been born. That's wierd to think about.

What do I remember about Melanie's burn incident? Nothing. But I have lots of memories about the stories we heard about it. My father always got teary when he told about washing Melanie's burns and what a special time it was for him. I guess he really felt important or like he was being a very good father--which I think he was. But he has a lot of emotion about it all.

My mother talks a lot about how God was using Melanie by her being in the hospital and singing to some angry old man. When Melanie became a singer when she was older, I wondered why God would do something like that for her but not for me. I'm a really good singer, too. I wonder sometimes, about how God does what He does--how he makes the decision to give a sign to one person but not another.

Melanie never really talked about what happened to her, even when she was older. But Mother and Dad seemed to have a lot of emotion about it and loved to tell the story--to us or anyone else who would hear it. It made me feel like I lived in a shadow sometimes, especially as she became more known in our town.

I know that God has certainly worked in my life. I'm glad my sister didn't die of her burns. I don't think about it much because as I said earlier, I wasn't even there.

View Four

I never saw what happened, but I heard Diane screaming across the lawn one day, all the way to the neighbor's house. I was in the tree in the backyard. She was hysterical, running to get Daddy, crying and screaming that Melanie was going to die. Daddy came running back across the lawn ahead of her and into the house. I quickly got down and went inside just in time to see Daddy, with a very worried look on his face, rush into the kitchen with Melanie wrapped in a towel. "Get a blanket!" he ordered, and he unwrapped Melanie on the kitchen counter. She was lying very still and crying. He was putting butter all over her before he wrapped her up inj the blanket and took off with her. The neighbor lady came over and stayed with us while they went to the hospital. She told us that Melanie was burned very bad and that we should pray for her. So we knelt down and did that.



I don't remember very much about what happened in the next couple days except that Mommy and Daddy weren't with us too often. They took us over to some people's house to stay while they were in the hospital with Melanie. The people had turkeys at their farm. As soon as I got out of the car, I went across the lawn to go see something. There was a funny sound behind me and I turned around to see a whole bunch of turkeys coming after me, looking at my head. I was scared to death and I started to run. They ran, too. I climbed up on top of a picnic table to get away from them. But they jumped up on the bench part of the table and were starting to come up onto the table with me. I screamed bloody murder, and Daddy came over and scared the turkeys away. He was laughing his head off. I was terrified and awfully glad he got me out of there. He laughed and joked about that happening for years.



Later that day, Daddy drove us over to the hospital lawn so we could wave to Melanie upstairs. I had become so worried that she wouldn't come home again, that I wanted to see her real bad. So we went onto the lawn and looked up to the fourth floor. There, who we saw didn't look like her because she had all this white stuff all over her. I couldn't see her hands or anything. But I knew it was her because Mommy was holding her up to the window. I felt really good to see her because I loved my baby sister.



When Melanie finally came home, I saw the way Mommy and Daddy treated her and I realized that she had to be taken care of carefully. I made sure that she didn't get her bandages dirty, and I played with her and told her stories so she wouldn't feel sad. She acted different when she came home, but I saw her looking at me to cheer her up, so I always did. I have a picture of us from that time: Melanie was dressed up in a white dress with a white dresser scarf over her head like a veil. I had on a bowtie over my striped T-shirt. We had Shultz, our Daschund, with a white bonnet on him and a white dress. We put him in Diane's doll carriage and took a picture of us, all getting ready to get married in our make-believe game. Melanie liked to play those kinds of games with me and I think it made her feel better.



I look back at that picture and remember very fondly, how I protective I was of Melanie. We used to be very close and she needed the help I gave her. I worried for awhile about her dying because Mommy and Daddy would cry about her, especially when they told other people about what had happened to her. But soon she didn't have to wear bandages at all, and she could run around and fall down like kids do without being hurt. Her skin wasn't tender after awhile. I remember this time warmly and have always been so glad Melanie made it through.