I Wish . . .

March 7, 2023February 17, 2024 ~ Sharon Abbott ~ 1 Comment

We both had red hair – a dark auburn really. Much like our mother’s, I think. She had brown eyes; I had blue. We grew up in the same family; sort of. She lived out her childhood in a family with both a mother and a father in the home, surrounded by four siblings only a few years older than she. From the age of four, after my father’s death, I grew up in a home with a single mom and her: a sister seventeen years older than me. She was born in the middle of the Great Depression and I was born at the beginning of what some called the Golden Age – the 1950’s. We shared a home, a family background, and genetics but though I know ABOUT her, I really didn’t know HER. And that’s on me.

Her name was Lola Irene. I have no idea why she was given that name – maybe because my mother liked the sound of it. I do know that it wasn’t until years later that my mother realized she had done the very thing she disparaged my grandmother for. My dad’s name was Ray. He had a brother named Roy. My mother told me, “I wondered why anybody would be so stupid as to give two boys in the same family such similar names. It led to no end of confusion – for everybody!” Then one day – when it was too late to do anything about it – she realized she had done the same thing with two of her daughters: Lila and Lola. I think after that she always cut my grandmother some slack.

When Lola was five days old she contracted whooping cough. She ran a high fever for days and though my parents prayed fervently, they did not expect their baby to survive. They would not have been the first family they knew to lose an infant to one of the many diseases that every parent of that generation feared. But at last the fever broke; their baby had survived. It would not be until later that they would understand the aftermath: the high fever plus the whooping cough had caused brain damage resulting in permanent physical, intellectual, and developmental disabilities.

As a child, my sister often experienced petit mal seizures, though neither the doctors nor my parents understood what these were. They grew used to her “spells” as they called them: periods of time where she stared into space unseeing and unaware of her surroundings. Nobody thought much of it; maybe she’s daydreaming, they said. It wasn’t until she was 20 that she had her first grand mal seizure and was diagnosed with epilepsy. Though medication (which could have terrible side-effects) kept them somewhat under control for periods of time, these seizures would worsen and continue for the rest of her life and became debilitating and dangerous.

Our older sister Lila had moved from Nebraska to Denver a year out of high school to attend nursing school. There she met her husband and they settled in a town south of Denver – Pueblo, Colorado. I think it was in the fall of 1953, Lila brought her children home to the farm for a visit. Lola was sick and getting sicker every day with fever and terrible muscle aches. Lila insisted they take her to a hospital about an hour away. It was there they diagnosed her with polio and she had her first grand mal seizure which led to the diagnosis of epilepsy. It was a scary time for all of them, but once again Lola pulled through and though the polio left her limbs weaker, she suffered no paralysis. Because we are all shaped by our stories, I think this is the reason that I am a believer in vaccines. My sister Minnie’s husband also contracted polio as a teenager and as a result wore a brace and walked with a cane the rest of his life. Neither the whooping cough nor the polio vaccine were available to them; I’m glad they were for my children.

My sister Lila was home for a visit. My brother was home from Korea and the family wanted a picture. The next day, Lola
( top row far left) would be taken to the hospital and diagnosed with Polio.

I don’t know when I learned all of these details. Somewhere along the way, I’m sure my mother shared them with me to help me understand why Lola needed extra care and why she couldn’t do all the things other grown ups could. Why she couldn’t live by herself or drive a car or get a job. Why things that seemed easy and effortless to me were harder for her. Back then we used the word handicapped. Today we would say disabled, a term I have only recently learned the disabled community prefers to special needs. It’s interesting to me that so often terms that start out as a straightforward definition become loaded and stigmatized until they are avoided altogether and replaced with something new until later reclaimed by the community.

In 1954, after my father’s death, my mother moved with Lola and me to Pueblo where she could find work to support us while being near Lila. After the first year or so we bought a two bedroom house near the hospital where Mom had procured a job as a cook. My mother and Lola shared one bedroom and I had the other to myself. It never once occurred to me why this was the arrangement, and I never thought to ask. But now I wonder – how did that feel to a 22 year old woman to be sharing a room with her mother? But I never remember her complaining – though I’m sure if the tables had been turned, I would have raised all kinds of hell.

This picture had to be taken shortly after we moved to Pueblo. We all have that dear-in-the-headlights look.

I remember there was a period of time when my sister had an unofficial job. She was a companion for a lady in a wheelchair and she would go to her house and fix her lunch and hang out with her so the woman, whose name was Esther, didn’t have to be alone all day. And sometimes from time to time I would go with her and we would put together puzzles and Esther let me use her typewriter and I felt so grown up. Did I ever tell my sister that? Did I ever tell her I appreciated that she let me do that? I don’t think I did.

Later she worked at the Goodwill. She seemed happy there. Maybe she felt like it was a real job and she was doing real work. She got a paycheck and money of her own and she made friends. I don’t know how long she worked there or why it ended. My guess is that the seizures made it difficult and my mother was anxious about it. I never asked her and we never talked about it.

The truth is, I don’t really remember talking to her much at all. As I got a little older I think I felt like we didn’t have much in common. I had my friends and my life and her life was so . . . different than mine. I couldn’t relate to her and I didn’t try and that’s on me.

I have very little memory of what anyone got me for a wedding present except this: Lola gave me a little Correlle teapot. She knew I liked tea. I have no idea how she knew that except she clearly paid more attention to me than I did to her. When I got married and moved out, I know that was a hard time for her – not because she missed ME really, but I think she felt like she wanted her own place and she wanted her own life, too, And she didn’t want to live with her mother forever. My mom knew her daughter could never live on her own and she would not put her in a “home” as she had seen others do with their “handicapped” children. But Lola persisted.

I don’t know it for a fact but I am guessing that it was Lila who persuaded my mother that Lola needed something different and that she deserved to live as independently as she possibly could. I’m sure there were also hard conversations where Lila made my mother come to grips with the fact that Mom would not always be around to take care of her daughter. . . and then what? So Lila started looking and they found a place in Colorado Springs – only 30 minutes away from Pueblo – where Lola could live in a little apartment but there were people there to look in and help when needed. And if the time ever came – which it did – that she needed more care, she could move into another wing where more supervision and care would be provided. It was the right call and even I knew she was happy in this place, surrounded by friends and activities she could be a part of. Lila and her family often visited, and she lived out her days in this way to the age of 60 – well loved and well cared for.

Out of all my siblings, Lola is the only one I ever shared a home with. I should have known her better than any of the others. But I didn’t. I simply didn’t take the time or make the effort to learn about her and her life. And I am the poorer for it. My mother used to say to me, “I don’t understand how she stays so happy and so positive with everything she’s had to deal with in her in life, but she does.” I wish I had asked her about her life and her stories and her memories. I wish I had made the effort to see the world through her lens. I wish I had included her more. I wish I had taken her for a ride in my new car when I came home with my driver’s license. I wish I had asked her to be part of my wedding. I wish after I moved out of state, I had sent her pictures of my babies and called her on her birthday. I wish I had been a better sister and a better human.

Because what I know now as a grandmother of some awesome kids with disabilities is that I am the poorer for not having shared more of life with my disabled sister. She had so much to teach me. And I had so much to learn.

My beautiful, auburn haired, brown eyed sister would be 90 years old today. Happy Birthday, Sister!

my mother, my siblings, and me – one of the few photos of all of us

After I moved to Maryland, my mother and Lila brought Lola to visit. She got to fly on an airplane and visit the capital – an adventure she throughly enjoyed!

Look at that Baby!

January 8, 2020December 11, 2024 ~ Sharon Abbott ~ Leave a comment

It is a story she told often around this time of year. She had gone to church that morning, come home and fixed Sunday dinner. She didn’t feel all that great but was sure it couldn’t be labor and even if it was, it would be many, many hours before she would give birth. She knew this for a fact because her first one had taken hours if not days of excruciating pain, and this was not that. And so she did the dishes, straightened the kitchen, and dismissed the growing-ever-more-regular twinges in her belly. Until she finally agreed that they could go to the hospital just to check things out and make sure everything was okay

By 5:00 that evening she was sitting cross-legged on her bed reading the Sunday funnies, eating a snack and chatting happily and excitedly with her husband. She had just delivered her second son! Perhaps she credited her doctor with the ease of this delivery which is why she chose the doctor’s last name as her baby’s middle name. In any event, the delivery was perfect; the baby was perfect. Or so they told her. This all happened in 1950 – in the days when babies were whisked away to the nursery as soon as the cord was cut to be attended by “professionals” and once they were cleaned and scrubbed and dressed, then and only then, would the parents be allowed to look at them through the nursery window.

And so she hopped out of bed (she always said it this way – “hopped out of bed”) and walked down the hall to the nursery. There was another mother standing at the window admiring all of the freshly scrubbed and swaddled babies and they stood there together recounting their recent birth stories, one contraction at a time. And then mid-sentence, one particular baby caught her eye. “Oh look!” she said to the other mother. “Look over there at that one. Isn’t that just the ugliest baby you ever saw!?! Don’t you feel sorry for his mother?!!” It was only then that she saw the name taped to the bassinet. “Baby Boy Abbott”.

My mother-in-law loved to tell this story about her second born son: Paul Rowan Abbott. And then she would laugh at herself and add “And he turned out to be the cutest baby anyone ever did see!”

And so today, on his birthday (a birthday he shares with Elvis and claims is the best gift his mother ever gave him), it seems only appropriate to tell the story again. And to honor this woman who birthed and raised the man I love to the moon and back.

She had eight children, a multitude of grandchildren, took in every stray (including me) who came along and loved them all fiercely. She loved her fur coat, her jewelry, her Denver Broncos, her red dresses, her coffee with cream and her husband of over 60 years. She was an opinionated and outspoken woman and I loved her for it. Having grown up in abject poverty herself, she was generous to a fault. A pastor’s wife for over 20 years, she understood and appreciated my life better than most people ever could. I knew from early on that she liked me at least as much if not more than she liked her son and that I would always have an ally in her. She proved this to be true until the day she died.

She taught me to make chicken and noodles the way she did (don’t waste time rolling the noodles paper thin) and how to welcome the stranger. She taught me to celebrate or grieve with a good chocolate pie. She taught me that life is both amazingly wonderful and also filled with disappointments and heartache and that there are no guarantees. And she taught me that the only way through it is to love with abandon and pray to Jesus.

Though we disagreed about many things – the proper amount of sage to put in stuffing, the merits of sweet tea, the need to cook beef until it looked and tasted like charcoal – the one thing we always agreed on was that that baby in the nursery window turned out pretty darn good. And I have always thought that she had a lot to do with that.

Thank you, Judy. And Happy Birthday, Baby!

An Ordinary Life Lived in an Extraordinary Way

March 11, 2016March 20, 2024 ~ Sharon Abbott ~ Leave a comment

He was one of the gentlest souls I have ever known. It saddens me to say I don’t think I ever had a real conversation with him – one where we talked about meaningful things. But in retrospect what I think is that to him – it all had meaning. He entered into the “ordinary moments” in such a way that he recognized before the rest of us that looking back, we would name some of these as among the truly extraordinary experiences that would shape and define us for the rest of our lives.

I was lucky enough to be friends with his son. And when you were friends with one member of the family, you sort of became friends with the whole family. I liked the noisiness of their house; the chaos of lots of people and the constant party that seemed to always be in progress and the fact that when I arrived at dinner time they just pulled up another chair and seemed genuinely delighted that there was one more to crowd around their already crowded table. And when they all bowed their heads (a cue I picked up on pretty quickly) he would lead us in a prayer of thanksgiving – and I never in all the years I knew him found him to be anything other than grateful and thankful for all that God had given to him – even in the hard times.

Pretty quickly, I became one of their tribe and would spend the night in the girls’ dormitory – a big room which had been created by closing in the carport and finishing it off as a bedroom for the five girls. In the morning the boys would rise early to deliver their paper routes and then we would all gather around the kitchen table for the breakfast that he had prepared – usually bacon and eggs and cinnamon toast. Lots of cinnamon toast (how that toast got divided is a whole story in and of itself) and while everyone was being seated he would go to their room and wake his wife and she would come to the table in her red robe (probably one he had given her the previous Christmas) and they would kiss and then he would pull her chair out for her and she would take her seat at the table. I asked my friends about it once and they just shrugged and said, “I don’t know. That’s just the way it’s always been.”

They were busy eyeing the cinnamon toast, but I was captivated by this ritual and though I witnessed it many, many times over the years, it never lost its effect. That ritual said it all. He adored her. There is no other word for it. He put her first. Always. It spoke of his genuine, pure, and unabashed love for her and every time I saw it there was something in my heart that ached and I hoped to God that someday I would find somebody who would love me like this man loved his wife.

On his son’s 16^th birthday, a group of friends decided to show up at the house and take the birthday boy out to pizza. We all piled into somebody’s car and the bunch of us headed over. When we got there, the birthday boy was out collecting from his paper route customers and no, nobody knew when he would be back. “Well, tell him we stopped by,” we said and being the good friends that we were, we headed out to celebrate his birthday without him. When he got home his dad told him that we had been there and immediately noted the acute disappointment in his son’s face. “Where do you suppose they have gone?” his dad asked. “Oh, I don’t know. It could be one of half a dozen places.” And then his dad, who was tired and probably just returning from work himself said to his son, “Well, let’s go see if we can find them.” So he drove him around until he found us and left him there with us to celebrate. I don’t know why I remember this moment so clearly all these years later except that it spoke to me so profoundly of this father’s sensitivity to the feelings and longings of his son. And having celebrated my own children’s 16^th birthdays, I look in the rear view mirror and wonder if maybe he had hoped that they might have a family celebration when he got home from work or he would at least be able to have some cake and ice-cream with this boy-growing-into-a-man. But if he did, he never said as much. To spend his evening driving around town looking for a bunch of kids wasn’t a big thing – except to his son.

When I married into the family, I came to understand that though Paul’s mom was the life of the party and the one who seemed to take care of us all, it was his dad who was the foundation of the tribe. He cared for her like a queen and she reigned over the kingdom well. She was his beloved and in that she had everything she needed. Theirs was a love story for the ages and it changed them both. It changed me. This is the man who baptized me into the faith and then officiated at our wedding. Over the years, many of them before I knew him, he pastored and cared for God’s people. He loved them the only way he knew how – like Christ loved the church.

He died in an accident in February of 2001. His last words were to his wife: I love you. It could have been no other way. A few short months later, his wife was hospitalized and died the next day – on their 56th wedding anniversary. She simply did not know how to be here without him.

The other thing that must be said about this gentle man is that I never saw a baby who did not love him. He was like a magnet and I watched him quiet many a fussy baby who would not be comforted even by their mother (my own included). It was not unusual for him to slip into the bedroom where we were sleeping on our visits home and take the baby downstairs with him to play and cuddle and love – giving us some much welcomed rest. His grandchildren loved him fiercely. When our youngest, Fletcher, was little and figuring out the language and the family relationships, he christened Paul’s parents “Gee-paw and Gee-paw” and it’s what they stayed for a long time. When he grew older, Gee-paw would call most Sunday afternoons to talk football with him after a Redskins or a Broncos game. And Fletcher loved it. I loved him for doing it.

Today is his birthday; he would be 92 years old. And if he were here I would call him to wish him a Happy Birthday and to tell him, “Dad, you done good! Your boy turned out okay. Actually he’s a lot like you. He loves me oh-so-well and the only thing you could have done better was to teach him to cook. Thank you.”

Image (43) — David Abbott with his son, Paul

The Wookiee

March 4, 2016March 20, 2024 ~ sean ~ 1 Comment

a guest post by Sean Abbott:

The way the rest of the family tells the story, the reason she was relegated to play the Wookiee in our Star Wars games of make believe was because of the rust color coat she had and her red hair. Okay, that might have been part of it, but the real reason was that she was my partner and what is Han Solo without his partner, Chewbaca. And yes, I did play both Han AND Luke but I was the ONLY brother and besides, it was my game: I would play the hero (Han) and not for the first or the last time, she would be my partner. It is my first clear memory of her.

She was my first sibling and my first sister. She was my first friend and my first playmate. I’m sure my parents told me before she was born that my life was about to change, but I was too young, and that is too long ago for me to remember. I have many early memories of her, but as I grow older, the exact sequence of events gets hazy. I do have some very vivid memories of a Christmas morning many, many years ago in Lawrence, Kansas. We lived on the second floor of a two story house. The living room was wallpapered. In my memory there doesn’t seem to be a lot of paint in the early to mid 70’s – just wallpaper. Regardless, the wall paper was a mist green with a pine cone / pine tree / pine branch print. There was a beautiful Christmas tree set up in the room and we (the kids) were opening presents. I sat opening presents with her. Nothing really remarkable or worthy of a memory maybe, but we sat together in the room with the pine cone wall paper and she was there.

It was in that same house that Tabi got shocked by the electrical outlet. Same room actually. Now there is some debate on the exact sequence of events. Tabi claims I challenged her to stick the key in the outlet. I plead the fifth. I was too young to really understand the consequences of what had happened, but I do know that after she stuck the key in the outlet and all hell broke loose, I was acutely aware of the pain my sister was in, and I knew that this was (a) BAD, (b) I didn’t like it, and (c) I was very scared for my sister. Fortunately for both of us and for the partnership, she didn’t die and I didn’t get in too much trouble. I have other memories from that house with her, most of them involving riding tricycles and playing in the trees in the back yard / alley area. And picking mulberries with her. We used to spend hours picking mulberries together.

As the years rolled on, Tabi continued to be my partner. Of course we fought, like all siblings do, but how many times had we seen Han and Chewie in a heated argument (even if we never really understood it)? That was us. We fought constantly (even if no one understood it), but we always made up.

As I grew older and we no longer played Star Wars on a daily basis, Tabi was the first one that I confided in about my life. Usually it was my crushes, but as a young boy, what else is there in life?

When I joined the Marine Corps, Tabi continued to be my partner. In the fall of 1991 she drove down to Camp Lejeune to pick me up and bring me home for Thanksgiving. A 14 hour drive there and back (who thought that was a good idea?) She didn’t make the trip down to Lejeune often, but she was frequently the one who volunteered to pick me up where my ride dropped me off on many a weekend, whether it was in Maryland, the Eastern shore, or West Virginia. I never truly appreciated the sacrifice that she made to do that, but as a result of those times together, we continued to grow closer.

Once I got out of the Marine Corps, we even made a few additional road trips together. I have vague memories of the two of us almost crashing a car – a memory in which a spider played a major role. To this day I can’t remember who was driving, just lots of girlish screaming and a smashed spider that ended up on the ceiling of the car. One of the screaming voices in the car (the louder one) may or may not have been my own.

As I grew older we continued to grow closer. Even after I was married, and during the times I struggled in my life and I felt that I was all alone, she was consistently the first one to reach out to me, let me know that she loved me and that she was there for me. Her compassion for me during those times was a testament to her name. In Hebrew, the name Tabitha means – beauty, grace – from the Aramaic word for Gazelle. She has been the definition of grace.

Now that we are both adults, she continues to amaze me. She is an awesome aunt to my three boys. She deeply and truly loves them as if they were her own. She is an amazing friend to my wife and loves her as a sister and a friend. When I was injured in an accident in 2014, she took time off work and out of her schedule to drive down to North Carolina to take care of me and my injured Marines, allowing us to heal, and providing the extra support needed for our family during that time. And trust me when I say that cooking and caring for three recovering Marines is a monumental task – one she performed with grace. Chewie himself could not have not done it better.

We both still love Star Wars (and with the recent movie there have been many texts and phone calls), but we have also expanded our love for stories. While Tabi was taking care of me and my fellow Marines, I got her hooked on The Arrow and The Flash. I don’t talk long on the phone very often to anybody. Except Tabi. Every so often I call my partner to discuss the latest plot twists in our stories. And those phone calls I truly do enjoy and love.

She was born two years, two weeks, and two days after me which makes today her birthday.

So to my sister, my friend, and partner:

AAAUUAAAUAUAUAUAUUUH AHRGURHGUUAAUURGUAAUUWUHUAAAUUUH AURGUAAAUHRGURHG! AGURUHUUUAAH UAUAUUAAUGHAUAUAUAAAUUAAUGHA UURGUHUU UARHUARGUGHUUAUA UURGUHUU UAAUUUUHUAUAUGHAUUAAUUARUAUAUAAAUGHRUGHA!!

Which translated from Wookiee means “Happy Birthday, Tabi. Now prepare to jump to hyperspace!!”

In the Heat of the Night

August 12, 2015March 9, 2024 ~ Sharon Abbott ~ 1 Comment

She was born in the throes of a fierce Kansas thunderstorm on a hot summer night. The wind hurled the rain against the hospital windows until I thought surely they would break. The lightning splintered the night sky and the thunder cracked open the heavens and the splintering and cracking open of my body seemed to answer back with an ever increasing intensity. Paul sang to me, he read to me, he talked to me and he prayed over me and the storm raged both inside and out. I was exhausted and I was stuck and it seemed we were at an impasse. I had been in this room all day, all evening and all night. The dawn would break before long. The doctor explained “You are stuck at eight centimeters and have been there for too long. We are going to take you to delivery and see if you can push the baby out. If not, we’ll bring you back.” What he meant was, “If you can’t deliver the baby, we will bring you back to surgery and do a Caesarian” (today that decision would have been made hours earlier). What I heard was, “. . . we will bring you back to this room of torture and you will continue to do what you have been doing for the last bazillion hours.” And I knew that hell would freeze over before I would let that happen.

I no longer remember how long I pushed, but I knew that I was nearing my limit. Later, when I looked at myself in the mirror, I realized that I had broken what looked like every capillary in my face from the sheer force of the pushing. The doctor tried forceps and I shrieked at him to get away from me. He sat down on a stool a little ways away to rest (what did HE have to rest from?!) and I knew any minute he was going to call this. And then it was over. In one long and horrific contraction. All at once – just like that. No head and then shoulders and then body. It was like a cannon ball being shot out of the cannon. The doctor jumped, ran, grabbed (several times) and I heard him yell, “I GOT IT!” Her whole body came flying like a bat out of hell, face up, eyes wide open and he caught her by one foot . It was a hard-won fight, but she had prevailed and she would be a fighter for the rest of her life.

We took her home from the hospital to the upstairs apartment of an old, un-airconditioned house (this house and the Kansas summer heat are detailed in other stories). We had acquired a working window air conditioner and so we could cool one room, the living room. On really hot nights we would put the older two kids and Paul on the floor, and I would sleep on the couch. By the time we got home from the hospital the worst of the heat had broken and so the kids were back in their room and Paul and I and the baby slept in the living room: Paul on the floor, me on the couch and the baby in the cradle. Our first night home Paul insisted, “After what you’ve been through, you need to rest (no argument from me there) so when she wakes up, I’ll get up and bring her to you and you just stay put.” We had a plan. About 2:00 a.m. I heard her stirring. “Paul, she’s awake.” Nothing. She starts to whimper. “Paul, can you get her?” Nothing. She begins to cry. “PAUL, can you bring the baby to me?” Nothing. “Okay. I’ll just get her myself.” Nothing. By now she is screaming as am I, “PAUL!!! WAKE UP!!!!!!” At which point, he sat up, put his pillow carefully in my arms, and passed out cold. But his intentions were good.

Maybe it was because it had taken all of her energy just to be born, but from the first day, she slept. . . a lot. Within a couple of days, she was sleeping for 8-10 hours at night, with long stretches in the daytime as well. It was nothing like the first two but I figured each one is different and all was well. . . until we took her to the doctor for her follow up. The doctor weighed her and the drop in her birth weight was alarming. “How often is she nursing?” the doctor demanded. I explained that sometimes during the day she would go for 6 hours and at night 8-10. “But she can’t be hungry,” I assured her pediatrician. “She doesn’t cry.” “Mrs. Abbott, your baby is starving. She’s too weak to cry.” But I cried. And then we went home and set a timer and woke her up every two hours around the clock and every day we took her to the doctor’s office to weigh her in and slowly she began to gain weight and to thrive although it took her an entire year to double her birthweight to 16 pounds. I have always thought that maybe she took that first year to recover from the night we battled through the storm and to prepare herself for the battles she would fight throughout her life.

To quote the bard: “And though she be but little, she is fierce. ” She was not much past her first birthday the night we put her to bed in her crib and retired to the living room to unwind from the day. After about an hour she appeared in the doorway. Really??! Already she was climbing out of the crib? I knew she was a climber but I hadn’t been prepared for this – not yet. But I really was not prepared for what I found when I returned her to bed. She had dismantled the crib, pulling the bars out one by one until she had a created an escape hatch big enough for three of her to wiggle through. But that’s not all. She had removed the sheet from the mattress and discovered a tiny pin-prick of a hole. And now, covering the bedroom floor, were layers of cotton stuffing which she had systematically removed from said mattress until she had almost entirely emptied it of its content.

It was Thanksgiving Day and she was three. She was supposed to be napping. I think it started with the chair. Or maybe it was the piggy bank. Wherever it started, it ended with a trip to the emergency room. She had climbed onto the rocking chair to reach the piggy bank on the shelf and when they all came tumbling down, the piggy bank was shattered and the gash in her chin was going to need stitches. They put her little three year old body on the table wrapped in a papoose sort of straight jacket to keep her from moving because, the doctor explained, nobody could get out of that. She would have none of it and to their astonishment (though not to mine) she was quickly free and fighting them off. The doctor told Paul, “You’re going to have to help the nurse hold her down because we can’t do this if she’s moving and there is no way she will be still without restraint. Her dad leaned in. “Fathie, if you are perfectly still and do not make a move and let them put the stitches in your chin, I will take you for ice cream when we are done.” Okay – she whispered back and her body lay perfectly still and unflinching. Finding someplace to get ice cream on Thanksgiving Day proved to be problematic. But a promise was a promise and after driving the town, we stopped at 7-11 and bought a half gallon of ice cream.

Maybe she was always trying to recover that feeling of flying through the air that she had at the moment of her birth and the sense of being freed from the confines of the womb. She loved the freedom of gymnastics – flying through the air as she came off the vault or doing dismounts off the balance beam. She climbed to the top of the tree in the backyard and when her braids got tangled around the branches, she sent her sister to get me. “Sorry, I don’t do heights. You’ll have to wait till Dad gets home.” So she happily passed the time from her perch overlooking the world until assistance arrived. She loved the biggest and baddest rollercoasters at the theme parks. It was in the days before height restrictions on rides and she begged Paul to take her on a particularly daunting one at Busch Gardens. He hesitated, I think partly because HE wasn’t too keen on it. But she would not be deterred, and so he stood in the line with her and did his best to talk her out of it. As they were being buckled into the car he said again, “It’s not too late. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather ride something else.” She would not. And as they plunged to what felt to be sure and sudden death, he looked over at her. She set her jaw and hung on for the ride and loved every minute of it.

She was and is an obsessive organizer. She clipped coupons every week from the Sunday paper and during our monthly grocery shopping trips was quick to assure me that we could afford to buy the more expensive cereal or snack because she had a coupon. She loved to organize the pantry alphabetically and fussed at me when I did not return items to their proper place. “It would help,” I told her, “if your spelling were better.” Why would I think to put jello under “g”?” She couldn’t have been older than eight when a friend of mine with several small children of her own hired her to be her house cleaner. She would go once a week to Libby’s house: organize the kids’ toys, clean under their beds, rearrange the closets, and heaven only knows what else. When she was still a toddler her grandmother called her “the bag lady” because she always had a bag to carry all of her stuff and her accessories. Periodically she would stop mid-step, dump the bag out on the floor and take inventory and if even so much as a doll’s sock was missing, a massive hunt would ensue until said item had been located. My mother marveled that she could keep track of what was supposed to be in the bag at any given time; perhaps this was the beginning of her obsession with list making that would last a lifetime.

The organizational gene she got from her father. Along with his crystal blue eyes and his wanderlust and love for road trips. They are both wordsmiths and introverts and voracious readers. From me she carried the recessive gene that gave us the only red-headed grandchild though she herself was the only one of the six to have dark chestnut hair instead of red. She got the cancer gene that struck both my sisters and would not once but twice rear its ugly head in her body before she reached the age of 40. She got from me her love of summer heat and baking pies. And if she inherited her love of the open road from father, from me she got the “which way is north?” gene. I think she may be the only person who was as excited as I was when the GPS became standard operating procedure.

From the time she learned to make letters, she was a writer and It was not at all unusual to find on my bed at the end of the day a card or note she had written and left there for me to find.

In the months she lived in Germany she wrote often and eloquently of all she was learning about the land, the culture, the people and the history. When she went away to college, she wrote long and frequent letters home – sharing her life with us as it unfolded. And then again when she moved to Chicago and started her family, her pages-long, hand-written accounts of her life and her thoughts and her musings found their way often to our mailbox. I treasured them all.

As I look back over them now, these boxes filled with her letters, it reminds me how much we have lost with the advances in technology. Her message has changed since those childhood, college and young adult days. Her voice has always been her own.

When the storm was over and the wide-eyed baby girl was in my arms, I knew the name we had chosen was the right one. Faith Leanne – born August 12, 1976. “Faith, without works, is dead, ” writes James. It had taken a tremendous amount of hard work, on both her part and mine, to make it happen. But she was here in this world with all of her beauty and her giftedness and her struggles. She was a survivor and a message to us of God’s grace and of the faith it takes to endure the really hard times. As an adult she would choose a different name for herself, and I’m okay with that. Because, in the end, we all choose our own identities and our own stories, though they are forever and inextricably linked with those we call family.

Post Script: Let me just say how intimidating it is to write about a writer. She would say it so much better and with such poetry, but I can only tell it from my perspective and with my voice – so it is what is : a story about thunder and lightning and love.

Nobody Doesn’t Like Sarah Lee

August 9, 2015March 9, 2024 ~ Sharon Abbott ~ 1 Comment

She was my second August baby – born in the heat and humidity of a Kansas summer in 1978. We lived in an apartment on the second and third stories of an old house without air conditioning and it was beyond miserable.

Not only that, but we had learned only a few weeks before that the landlord was selling the house and we would need to move. So my friend Lori came and helped me to pack up the house where we ran fans to move the sticky, hot air and tried to keep the six, four, and two year old from killing each other or unpacking the boxes as fast as we packed them. Actually she packed and I sat in front of the fan drinking iced tea. I was nine months pregnant, soon-to-be homeless, tired and hot and cranky, and terrified of the upcoming labor and delivery. The memory of the one from two years before still haunted me and I was convinced this time I or the baby would surely die.

It was too hot to sleep, I couldn’t get comfortable, and about 5:00 a.m. I woke Paul. “I think we should go to the hospital.” “Why, are you in labor?” he asked as he grabbed his clothes. “I think so. Maybe. I don’t know. Not really. But it would be cool there and I think I might be having some contractions . . . maybe.” Paul finally agreed that the worst that could happen is that we could get some temporary relief before they sent us home. By 5:30 we were at the hospital and I thought I might be in labor. Maybe. Much to our surprise, they admitted me and as the contractions picked up in intensity, Paul and I settled in for the long haul, drinking in the cool, de-humidified air. I hoped and prayed that I would have a baby by nightfall, but we were not optimistic. Before too long, the nurse announced in a very cheery voice, “Mrs. Abbott, I think we’re going to have this baby here by breakfast.” Seriously? How could this happen?? And I knew at that moment that there was, indeed, a God in heaven. The delivery was fast, complication free, and almost before we started, it was over. Sarah Leanne – born August 9 at 7:30 a.m. I remember the doctor singing the jingle from the Sarah Lee commercial: Everybody doesn’t like something, but notbody doesn’t like Sarah Lee..

But we still had that pesky issue of our house being sold out from under us. We eventually found an upstairs apartment a block down the street from our previous residence which is a whole story within itself. Once again, it was an old house and we were renting the upstairs but it had no kitchen so we had to build a kitchen and “we” are not carpenters. But another story for another day. In the meantime we were still in August, still in Kansas, and still without air conditioning. So we improvised a plan that we would load up the kids and the baby and Lori in our old van and drive to a pastor’s conference being held at a camp in the Rocky Mountains. We found a great cardboard box to take for the baby to sleep in, threw some sleeping bags in the van and we were good to go. We had grown up in Colorado and we knew it would be cool and dry and besides we could stop by Pueblo at the foot of the mountains and visit my mother so she could see the new baby. “Let’s just make it a surprise visit,” I insisted. It is only in retrospect that I see that what made this attractive is that I did not wish to face my mother’s wrath when she learned of our plan to take a three day old infant on such an odyssey. I reasoned (incorrectly it turns out) that if we showed up on her doorstep she would be so pleased that she would keep her opinions of the wisdom of the plan to herself.

What I did not know at the time is that as we were making our way to the mountains, my oldest sister Lila was traveling across the plains of Kansas. My mother insisted that she take a detour to “check up on Sherry and the baby and to make sure she’s not overdoing. But we won’t tell her you’re coming – just drop in and surprise them,” my mother said. Which is how my sister arrived on the porch of 1223 Ohio in Lawrence, Kansas, to find that not only were we not at home, but that we were on a road trip to Colorado. “That can’t be,” she explained to the downstairs tenants. “She’s just had a baby. They wouldn’t be so stupid as to haul that baby across the country.”

In the “new” apartment, the three older kids all shared one big bedroom and Sarah slept in a cradle (which had replaced the card board box) in our room, but she was outgrowing the cradle which meant we would need to make other arrangements. Our good friends had given birth to their first born a few days before Sarah was born which meant that they too were on the lookout for a crib. And then one night Jim and Libby showed up at our front door holding a big box. “We brought you a crib,” they said. “Because if our baby is going to sleep in a new crib, so should yours.” And they came in and we unpacked it and set it up in the kids’ room and they slept through it all. It was not the first or the last time that God would show his generosity to us and our family through this couple and it was nights like these that linked our stories over the years.

When she was about three we were staying at a campground on vacation – The Blue Mountain Campground in Branson, Missouri. We pitched our tents, cooked over the campfire, went to Silver Dollar City for one day and hung out at the pool for several days. In the days of resorts and beach houses it sounds pretty lame but for somebody with four kids and no money, it was a great way to vacation! It was on one of those “hanging out at the pool” days that it happened. I had run up to the tent for something and Paul was with the kids. The big kids had a beach ball that they had blown up and were tossing back and forth to each other. Sarah didn’t want to get in the water – she couldn’t swim and the water was over her head – and she was happy to stand by the side of the pool in her new “thwimming thoup” and throw the ball to them. On one of the throws she forgot to let go and flew into the pool, lost the ball, and disappeared under the water. Her brother tried to help her but couldn’t manage to swim and carry her and that left Dad, a non- swimmer himself. He lay down flat on the concrete, reached his body and his arm far into the pool and grabbed her, pulling her out of the water. He likes to point out that he is the only non-swimmer in the family and yet the only one to save someone from drowning. Given her inauspicious start to camping, it is surprising that Sarah is the only one of the six who still enjoys pitching a tent in the great outdoors and sleeping on the ground. But she’s adventuresome like that and she gets her love for Nature and the out of doors from her father.

For Sarah, life was about discovery.

When she was about five and learning to read we would painstakingly work on letter sounds, blends, and trying to combine them into words. But it was laborious and less than rewarding. And then one day it clicked and she looked at the letters and they formed themselves into a word and then another and then another. And that tiny little person looked up at me, her face lit up with the excitement of a whole new world that was about to open up to her and shouted, “This is great!! I can read and listen at the same time!!!” And so began her life-long love of reading. To this day, she is one of my best resources when it comes to new and interesting reading material because she is always reading something.

She must have been six or seven when one of the other kids pointed out to me that Sarah was walking around the neighborhood with a clipboard, knocking on doors. “Why?” was the obvious question. They just shrugged. Turns out she was taking a poll to find out who they intended to vote for in the next election. Better than selling vacuum cleaners I guess.

When she was ten we moved into a new neighborhood – one with kids. This happened to coincide with her new found interest in the performing arts and before long she was hard at work: writing, casting, directing, acting and producing a play. It might have been a musical. One summer day a steady stream of neighbors began arriving at the front door – some of whom we had never met. They had tickets in hand and they were there for the “show” – one in which their children had landed starring roles. Sarah appeared and pointed them to the basement, handing out the hand-made programs as they filed past her. “You might need to set up some folding chairs,” she instructed me. “And put out some cookies for intermission.” Got it. They played to a packed house who cheered loudly and applauded wildly and when the reviews were in, they were universally favorable though the show closed before it ever made it to off Broadway.

It was because of her that I began directing high school theatre – something I went on to do for twenty years. She gave me courage to tackle an overwhelming and intimidating task and figure it out as I went – to trust my instincts and to honor the process of creativity. She taught me that.

She went to a small college that really had no theatre department but by the time she left she had built up a whole program and when she graduated they hired her to carry it on. In the beginning she acted, directed, produced, designed and built the sets, made the programs, procured the facility, collected the props – all of it (just like when she was ten years old). In the early years if it got done, it’s because she did it. But to me this is the truly remarkable part: she so inspired others and mentored them that they took on responsibility and leadership and she passed on her love of the art to them. I saw every show she was in and every show she directed in those years and I was in awe of her every single time.

And what also became abundantly clear in those days is that she is one of the most hard-working people I know and she is a natural leader. This she has proven at every job she has ever held.

The other thing I have learned from her is that artistry resides in the soul – not in the equipment. Put her behind a camera and she will capture the moment, the person, the emotion, the beauty or the story every time. She “sees” it and then allows us to do the same. It’s a gift and it doesn’t matter how much you spend on the camera, if you don’t have it then you don’t have it. I have always wished I could just hire her to come and follow me around and take pictures of my life because it would help me to see the mundane or the ordinary as the truly beautiful and extraordinary moments that they are.

And then there is this: she is a story teller. Whether it’s telling you about the man in the airport and their discussion about tattoos, or retelling an old family story, or her photograph of a little girl on the boogie board at the beach, or putting on a play in the basement, she is a master story teller. And we are blessed beyond measure to have her as a part of our story. Something tells me her best stories are yet to be written.

Happy Birthday, Sarah! You amaze me every day.

This Is Fletcher Paul Avvott

June 20, 2015March 8, 2024 ~ Sharon Abbott ~ 2 Comments

“What if we named him Fletcher?” Paul asked. I liked it. “And Paul as a middle name,” I offered. And it was settled. He would have my name (Fletcher is my maiden name), his father’s name (Paul), and our name (Abbott). His siblings were old enough to have opinions and less than enthusiastic. “You can’t name him Fletcher. It’s not a real name.” But Fletcher it was.

His birth was the most traumatic of the six. Over two weeks late and with complications developing, the doctor wanted to induce. The kids cried foul. We had a lottery set up – everybody had contributed something: a week’s worth of chores, $5 worth of candy, a favorite book, something – and the loot would go to the person who had chosen the day of the week he was born. The doctor had said Monday – which just happened to be Paul’s day. I was in no mood to negotiate – the sooner the better. I arrived at the hospital about 4:00 p.m., they prepped me, set me up with the IV and started the Pitocin. With the first hard contraction, the fetal monitor registered severe distress and only a few minutes later the room had filled with people. “Mrs. Abbott, if we’re going to save your baby we need to do an emergency c-section. Now.” In the confusion of it all there was miscommunication – someone told Paul to put on scrubs and a mask and he could accompany me to the ER. There was lots of hurrying, lots of chaos, and on our part – lots of praying. When we got to the Emergency Room, the anesthesiologist took one look at Paul and the last thing I heard before they put me under was “Get him out of here!!!” Paul left the room, walked down the hall, removed his gown and heard the baby cry.

As I fought my way out of the general anesthesia, I was aware only of the searing pain. “Why?” I asked Paul. (Because he can read my mind and finish my sentences, he knew I was asking – ‘Why am I in this hell-hole of pain?’) “Because you had an emergency c-section. But the baby is fine.” “What?” I asked him, (translation: What did we have?) “We have a boy.” And I would drift back to sleep. A few minutes later: “Why?” “You had an emergency c-section. The baby is fine.” “What?” It’s a boy. And I drifted away. And so it went. . . . over and over and over. . . Even from those first days we took to calling him “the boy”. There were now four girls and the bookend boys.

Paul spent the night at the hospital that night. Until security asked required him to leave in the early morning hours. Turns out he can be a bit of a trouble maker when he thinks the nurses are not following the doctor’s orders to provide pain medication every four hours. The hospital air conditioning was on the fritz and we were in the throes of a stretch of 98 degree days, the room was crowded with the three little kids of my roommate who was also recovering from a c-section and whose husband did not want to pay for babysitting, and Paul was caring for both of us and keeping the kids from killing each other. So we took “the boy” and went home early.

Probably because he was the youngest of six and five of them significantly older than he, he was a pack animal – always the happiest when surrounded by the rest of the pack. An introvert by nature, he didn’t even need their attention – just their presence. When he was three years old, his only brother joined the Marines. It was the first tearing apart of his pack but the girls were not far behind. The day his sister got married, I found him in tears at the reception. In all the talk about her getting married, he had somehow assumed that this meant that she would move back home and bring her new husband with her. He sobbed as he learned that in fact, this was not the case.

He was a home-body by nature – so much so we wondered if he would ever leave home or just take up permanent residence in our house. As his siblings moved out and left him behind, one family in particular sort of took him in and he spent a great deal of time at their house, soaking up the chaos and the mischief of a large family. They would often invite him to spend the night and we would load up his backpack and send him off with his sleeping bag under his arm. It was usually before midnight when we would get the phone call: Can you come get me? And so we would make the 15 minute drive to their house, bring him home, and tuck him into to his own bed with his Beagle, and they were both the happier for it. One night it was later when he called – maybe around 1:30. When we pulled up in the drive he was waiting on the front porch with his backpack and sleeping bag. “Problem?” “No. I just wanted to go home to sleep.” The next morning around 9:30 Mary Lee called me: “Sharon, this is really awkward but is Fletcher there?” “He is. Is there a problem?” “Well, when the kids came down for breakfast and Fletcher wasn’t with them, I asked where he was. They didn’t know. I asked them how they could not know. ‘ummmm, when we woke up he wasn’t here.’ ‘And you didn’t think that might have been important to tell somebody? How am I going to tell the pastor that I lost his son?!’ Not wanting to bother anyone, he had simply made the phone call, gathered his things and slipped out to wait on the porch while the family slept. He was like that. In all fairness, when he announced he wanted to go away to college, none of us saw that plan working out very well, but he took to it and to dorm life like a fish to water and he never looked back. Who knew?

I think he might have been about four when he wanted his sisters to take him shopping so he could buy me a Mother’s Day present. They made some suggestions as to what might be a good gift (within his budget). He thanked them but was clear that he knew exactly what he was looking for – he simply needed a ride. They obliged and drove him to the store where he was accustomed to doing all of his shopping – The Dollar Store. It took a while, but he finally found it. He brought it home and headed off to his room with a roll of wrapping paper and a roll of scotch tape and spent the afternoon behind closed doors. On Mother’s Day, he handed me his well-wrapped and tightly taped offering. “ I knew I wanted to buy you diamonds because I really wanted you to have diamonds, but then I found BLUE DIAMONDS and I knew you would love them even more!!!” And I do. And they are one of my most treasured possessions to this day. So a note to my daughters – when you are going to through my stuff after I die and you come across the blue diamonds – remember how valuable they are and do not say to one another, “Now why do you suppose she kept a pair of plastic, clip-on earrings?” I kept them because every woman should feel so loved. Give them to Emily. She’ll know what to do with them.

So many of the one-liners that made it into our family lexicon came from “the boy”:

“I’ll take a coke/fries” (said all as one word – think hashtag) – which is what he hollered from his car seat in the far back seat of the van every time we pulled up to a fast food drive-thru.

“I’ll take a twenty” – which is what he hollered every time we went through a bank drive-thru.

“STOP!!! I lost my tontact (translation: contact lens)!!” which is what he would randomly yell from his carseat as we drove down the road at which point we would send someone to “retrieve” the imagined tontact from the floor of the back seat. They would offer up an imaginary lense they had recovered but more often than not would be told “No, that’s not it.”

“What’s the plan?” – always wanting to be kept in the loop of the family’s coming and goings and afraid that he would be cut out of the festivities.

“Go Skins! Hot Dog! Beat the Bears!” – a mantra his father taught him to aggravate his sister who was a die-hard Chicago Bears Fan.

“I’ll bet that’s a small church,” – a muttered response to himself when he overheard a conversation about a pastor who said, “Anyone is welcome here. Except complainers. They should go somewhere else.”

None of us can hear the song God Bless America without hearing his little voice belting out the lyrics: ” to the lotion, white before“

When Fletcher was an RA (Resident Assistant) in college at the same time his brother was a Drill Instructor in the Marine Corps, we laughed that they both had the same job: babysitting boys away from home for the first time. “Yes,” Fletch said, “but he gets a gun.”

When he was about three, he loved to answer the phone: and raced to answer it before anyone else could get there. “Hello. This is Fletcher Paul Avvott. May I help you?” At which point someone would say, “Oh good grief! He’s got the phone again.” Which of course was a problem because he was not capable in any way, shape, or form, of taking a message.

So excited to join a t-ball team, he left for his first practice dressed in his shirt and his hat. When he got home he was heartbroken. Sensing something had gone terribly awry Paul asked him how it had gone. “Dad, I’m out of t-ball.” We could not imagine what had happened. This was the sweetest, most gentle child you could ever hope to see. What had he done to get himself thrown out of t-ball???!! Paul probed further – why, what happened? “Well, I hit the ball and then they said, ‘RUN!!’ and I did and when I got there they said, “You’re out!” Such a literalist he was.

By the time he reached high school, the other five were gone and it was just him. . . and his Beagle. His siblings complained about how easy he had it – when they were growing up they had to share bedrooms, stand in line for the bathroom and an even longer line to get access to a car to drive at any given time. He had the whole upstairs to himself – a suite of rooms really, or as one of the older ones put it – the only thing that keeps it from being an apartment is a kitchen which doesn’t matter anyway because he doesn’t know how to cook anything. He had a car sitting in the driveway which was his to drive whenever and wherever he needed to go. What he did not have was the rest of the pack. And those were lonely years for him.

We wondered often in those years before he left when the little red-headed boy had disappeared and left in his place this approaching-adulthood young man with facial hair. When he was little, he was an early riser and every morning he would come into our bathroom where Paul was shaving. He put the toilet seat down, climbed up and leaned against the sink to watch his dad cover his face with the white, billowy cream and then scrape it off again. “Watcha’ doing?” he asks. “I’m shaving,” is his father’s reply. “Can I have some shave?” he wants to know. Paul squirts a handful of shaving cream in his tiny little hand and he smears it over his face and then scrapes it off with a hand-me-down safety razor (sans razor blade). When they have both finished this task, he drys his face with a towel and toddles to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. It was a daily ritual that they kept religiously from the time he was two until. . . . when did it end? Not after a year. Maybe it was sometime in the second year he began to miss days – he would sleep in a little late or get busy playing or go to get his breakfast first and forget about what was happening down the hall. And then he would return for a day or two . . . until eventually the days he came were fewer than the days he missed and then one day he just never came back. We don’t know when the last time was. Thank God for small mercies. It would have been too hard to know it was the last day.

I do remember the day we packed him up and took him to college and I knew – this part is over. I grieved the loss even as I celebrated the person he had grown to be. But in that person, I could still see the essence of “the boy” he had left behind: kind, polite, generous, funny, sensitive to the feelings of others, a thinker and a lover of Jesus and His church. One morning when he was little (probably one of those days when he was showing up less often for the shaving ritual), Paul found him at the kitchen table by himself eating a bowl of cereal, lost in thought. “Daddy,” he said. “When we cry down, here does God cry up in heaven?” Giving voice to the question that matters to us all – Does God care? We started Cedarbrook when Fletcher was a year old. He grew up during the hard years when we were planting and growing a church and he had seen behind the curtain – he bore witness to the sacred beauty and the ugly sinfulness of ministry. And yet. After all that – he chose ministry as his calling and his profession. God cares.

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And here’s the interesting thing. There are days now, 27 years later, when I swear “the boy” is back. I catch glimpses of him from time to time. It’s Easter Sunday and I see the picture of him dressed in his Sunday Best with tie and dress shoes and beaming from ear to ear. I see him following Paul out to feed the fish and imitating his every move. I watch him track the movements of the rest of the family and try to account for each one, hoping they have not scattered too far – always looking for his pack. And though his hair is blond instead of red and his name is Ezra instead of Fletcher, for a minute time warps and I expect to see the Beagle trailing along behind him. I watch “the boy”, now grown big, singing the same songs to his boys that we sang to him so long ago and it makes my heart happy.

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Happy Birthday, Fletcher Paul Abbott! So what’s the plan?

Joy to the World. . . Every Day

May 10, 2015March 6, 2024 ~ Sharon Abbott ~ 1 Comment

She was my easiest labor, easiest delivery and was born on the Thursday before Mother’s Day. We had some friends over for dinner: chili and cinnamon rolls – admittedly an odd menu choice for May but nonetheless, that’s what we had. Why I remember this detail is anybody’s guess. We left for the hospital about 7:00 p.m. and a couple of hours later we were the proud parents of our fifth child – Joy Leanne. Joy because it just seemed so right and Leanne because it was the middle name of her three older sisters (another story for another day) and it seemed a little odd to change things up now.

I came home from the hospital the next day. On Sunday we went to church and then to Ponderosa for lunch since it was Mother’s Day. Paul took the other four in to get a table while I stayed in the car to feed and change the baby. When I finally made my way through the very crowded restaurant (it was Mother’s Day) an older lady stopped me. “How old is your baby?” she wanted to know as she admired the little red-headed bundle in my arms. “Three days”, I answered, sweeping the room for the table for seven. “Oh honey! You might do something this stupid with your first one, but trust me. . . by your second, you’ll know better! You’ll know to stay at home and rest!” Apparently I am a slow learner.

The child was a force to be reckoned with. She walked at seven months – not a few, halting steps but she walked across the room. And she never looked back. They asked us to move her out of the nursery because she roamed the room, snatching crackers out of the babies’ hands and moving on to the next one before anyone could stop her. At home, our only recourse was for everyone to man their stations and keep her out of their stuff and away from places she shouldn’t be. There is no use trying to teach a seven month old what is off limits.

If she learned to walk early, speech was not far behind. By a year old she was talking in sentences and by two she was talking in paragraphs . . . and talking. . . and talking. . . and you never knew what she would say or sometimes even what she meant by it but you had no doubt that she knew exactly what her point was.

Her favorite song was Joy to the World and she would randomly (and loudly) serenade the family, the restaurant, her Sunday School class or herself – even in mid July. I mean when you have a song that is written about you, why would you not?? Sometimes when she was feeling particularly generous she would substitute someone else’s name in place of her own “Fletcher to the world….” and always at full volume. But mostly, and often, it was Joy to the world. When people would comment on her head full of red curls – which they always did- she would agree “Yup, it sure is cully”.

When she was almost three we had a single guy who was living in our basement for a few months while he was between houses. Joy would corner him on his way in or out and chat with him. One day she said to him, “Joe, did you know I’m getting married?”

“Really??” he asked her. “I did not know that! Who’s the lucky guy?”

“You’re looking at him!!!”

As it turns out, that relationship did not work out – but not for her lack of boldness.

In both the church and the neighborhood I was known as Joy’s mother. She knew everybody and everybody knew her and they all found her enchanting – as did we. She seemed to draw a crowd wherever she went. One day Paul took her to McDonalds for lunch. Usually on such an outing she was so busy talking that she left most of her food untouched. But this day she had eaten all of it. “Good job on the chicken nuggets!” he encouraged her. “What does that mean?” She wanted to know. “Well, it just means you ate all your chicken nuggets. So good job.” She thought about it for a minute and then said, “So was that in Spanish?” One day I was combing her hair (or trying to) when she said to me, “Mom, you know why I like you? Because most of the time, you don’t even treat me like an orphan.” There was her revelation that the Super Bowl is really only a football game (which I wrote about in the story “It’s All About the Snacks”.) It was her world and we were only visiting.

When she turned two we rented a house that had an indoor swimming pool and a sauna. Crazy, right? I was paranoid about having a baby and a pool and so we set out to teach her to swim. Before long, she could jump into the pool, turn around, swim to the side and crawl out. We worked on this routine every day, but after putting her through her paces a few times, her teeth were chattering, her little body was shivering and she would say, “Only one more time, and then I get to sit in the warmer.” And while I could do without the swimming pool, I have often wished that every house I lived in thereafter had a warmer where I could reward myself at the end of an unpleasant task.

It was in that same house where she grew into our “hobbit child”. Not because she acted like a hobbit in terms of avoiding adventurers, but because she just so looked like one. I always thought if she had been born at the right time and the right place, Peter Jackson would have totally cast her in his films.

She was about three when we got a Cocker Spaniel puppy. Always thinking ahead, she asked if the puppy would have puppies. Maybe. What would we do with the puppies? Well we would probably sell them to somebody else who wanted a puppy. It was shortly after that she learned a new baby was coming to the family and that she would get to be the big sister. She seemed to take it in stride. And then one day I heard her talking to herself: “We will have baby puppies and a baby baby. And if we want, we can always sell the baby.” Let the record show, however, that when the new baby brother arrived she was over the moon and has been a devoted and loving big sister for the last 27 years – except, of course, for the times when he was being an annoying and irritating little brother. But as far as I know, she has never once considered selling him.

Her older siblings were 12, 10, 8, and 6 when she was born, so she came into a family with a clearly defined pecking order and a history that she had not shared, which my own experience teaches me had to make her feel at times like the odd man out. But her sisters doted on her. They carried her in their bicycle baskets, put her in a cardboard box and pushed her around the house keeping her happy with an unending supply of Smartie Pills, bought her toys with their own money, threw her birthday parties, and advocated on her behalf. When she desperately wanted an American Girl doll for Christmas and I thought they were outrageously expensive, they offered to pitch in with their own money. It was their idea to give her a Victorian doll house (one that came in a kit and had to be glued together piece by piece and then painted and then decorated and furnished) and helped put it together late into the nights before Christmas. It was her brother who salvaged an old computer and repaired and restored it for her when she got older.

My mother always said that looking at her was like turning back the clock – that in her she saw me at that age. She died when Joy was only five and I’m sad that her youngest granddaughter has few, if any, memories of her. She lost her other grandmother in her early teens and this, too, robbed her of a strong and remarkable woman. But she comes from a long line of such women, and their legacy and their traditions live on in her. And for that I am grateful.

And now, 31 years after that lovely May evening when Joy came to our world, she has a husband and three little girls of her own. And I swear that sometimes it’s like turning back the clock. Each in their own way, they are like their mother: sensitive, filled with a bull-in-the-china-shop energy, and the one with the head full of “culls” (even if they are blond instead of red.)

Happy Birthday to you, my dear . . and Joy to the world. . . this and every day!

Tabitha, Arise.

March 4, 2015March 6, 2024 ~ Sharon Abbott ~ 7 Comments

She was born exactly two years and two weeks and two days after her brother. This time I was prepared. I knew not to expect her on my due date – which was good considering she was almost a full two weeks late. By this time we had moved from Colorado to Kansas and so my mother had agreed to come and help out. When she arrived, she took one look at me and announced, “Oh, this will be a while. You’re not nearly miserable enough to be at the end.” As usual, she was right.

11001641_10205939108940665_4626973006023086453_o — “If you need anything,” she offered. She had no idea how much I would need her over the years.

But eventually I was miserable enough. It was a Sunday night and we had been to our house-church that afternoon. I should preface this next part of the story with this: this was a church made up of predominately college students. We were one of the few (as in two) families in the church. One of the young, single, (and not very sensitive) young men approached me. “I don’t mean to be insensitive, but I just have to tell you that being around pregnant women really makes me uncomfortable.” What do you even say to that? I was getting ready to tell me him exactly what he could do with his discomfort when a girl standing nearby, sensing the volatility of the situation stepped into the conversation. She was fairly new to the group and I knew her only a little. “Sharon, isn’t it? I just wanted to tell you that if you need anything, you can call me. I could come watch your little boy or whatever you need. Here’s my phone number.” I should pause here to say that that woman became one of my very best friends-for-life and befriended and mothered not just this baby, but all of my first four. Her name is Lori and I am deeply grateful for the part she played in my life in these years.

Which takes us to Sunday evening. That young, single, and insensitive guy, (who was also our good friend until his unfortunate comment earlier in the day) had stopped by to see Paul about some church business. The two year old was in bed, my mother was reading in the living room, and I had gone to lie down, exhausted from the day. Before long, I wasn’t feeling so well and my body remembered before my mind, that this was the same pain from two years ago. So I set the plan into motion. I told Paul to send Bill home since I obviously wanted to be sensitive to his comfort or lack thereof. My mother would stay with Sean, and Paul and I would head off to the hospital. Here is where the plan went awry.

Bill said that if it was all the same to us, he might like to come along for the ride and my mother wondered if there was anyone we might call so that she could also be at the hospital (my guess is she couldn’t tolerate the idea of Bill welcoming her grandchild into the world before she did.) Which is how we ended up calling Lori Phillips (a girl I barely knew) to come and stay with Sean so that Paul, my mother, and Bill could all be at the hospital – and even as I write this I wonder – What was I thinking??!!

Tabi as a flower girl in Lori's wedding — Tabi as a flower girl in Lori’s wedding

Through the night, Bill and my mother kept each other company in the waiting room. This time Paul was allowed to stay with me (we had made a lot of progress in two years). Sometimes my mother would come in and sit with me and give Paul a break – I suspect it was so that she could get a break from Bill as well. I drew the line at Bill: he would remain in the waiting room. And then came transition: or the “hold my hand don’t touch me” stage of labor as we affectionately call it (see post entitled “Valentines and Birthin’ Babies” ). I grew agitated and unhappy and snapped at my mother: “I can’t do this. You go get Paul and tell him to get in here because I am done with this. I can’t do it.” She was happy to leave. Paul’s greeting to me as he walked into the room was, “You are never going to believe this??!!! Guess who is in the waiting room??!!! You’ll never believe it!” I assumed the only reason he would bring this up now is because it was somebody that he knew I would really care about (Robert Redford comes to mind though what he would be doing in Lawrence, Kansas is beyond me.) So I gritted my teeth and managed,

“Who?”

“Bill’s dentist!! His wife is in the room down the hall. Small world, right!!!?”

“ARE YOU ^&*%$## KIDDING ME??!!!

And the only thing that saved him was that the nurse said, “We should get you to the delivery room.”

This was Paul’s first time to the dance and I have to say that having him there made all the difference. When my first one was born I remember being wheeled into the delivery room with bright lights, masked faces, and I felt so alone. Paul was amazing and throughout I knew that this time I was not alone. This time was different – we were there together and we were a team. I had no idea how the next hour would unfold and how desperately I would need my team. I pushed and pushed and pushed and with each push I knew I was pushing this life into the world and I felt powerful and strong and invincible. Paul was encouraging and cheering me on. The nurses and doctor were cheering. Everyone was cheering! One really hard push, another and another and then the doctor said, “One more push and we’re going to have this baby here!!” And I pushed and the baby was here and then the cheering stopped. It was quiet. Too quiet. And then it got noisy and the doctor was barking orders and the nurse who had been at my head hurried to join the doctor and they were all moving so fast and the doctor asked for something and a nurse dropped it and he swore and they ran to get another one and they put something down my baby’s throat and I kept asking what was wrong and why wasn’t she crying and I could hear Paul praying, and the tension in the doctor’s voice as he gave instructions to the nurses and they seemed to grow ever more desperate while the two of us watched this helpless little baby turning bluer and bluer, her eyes huge and her mouth opened wide, struggling to draw air into her little lungs. It was clear they were losing her.

Do names matter? Do we live up to or grow into our names? I don’t know. Maybe.

Somewhere in the pregnancy we had decided that if the baby was a girl we would name her after a woman in the bible, “a disciple named Tabitha” whose life was characterized by her kindness, generosity and service to the needy. When she died, the people in her village were so distraught that they sent for the Apostle Peter who happened to be in a town nearby, hoping against hope that he could do something. The book of Acts records it this way: “He knelt down and prayed; and turning to the body he said, ‘Tabitha, arise.’ And she opened her eyes, and he gave her his hand and raised her up”. And now, early on that Monday morning of March 4, 1974, it felt to me like a voice spoke into that room, a voice heard only by the baby girl named after a woman who was raised from the dead: “Tabitha, arise.”

How overwhelmingly grateful I am that this child who almost wasn’t came to be in our family. She has filled our lives with love, with laughter, with care, with generosity, with joy, and of course, with stories.

We lived on the second and third floor of a big house in the student slums that had no air conditioning, so in the summer we slept with the windows open. Our neighbors were a houseful of college guys that liked to party late into the night and then crawl out their second floor window to sleep on the porch roof. Tabi’s crib was next to the window which meant that she (along with the rest of us) were awakened often during the night by the party revelers. But the thing about her was that no matter how little sleep she got the night before, she always awoke at first light in a really cheery and talkative mood. And I always felt a wicked sense of satisfaction when I could hear her calling out the window at the top of her little voice, “Hi, guys!!! Whatcha’ doin? HI!!! HI GUYS!!!” until they crawled back through their window to sleep off the remainder of the party.

It was in that same house that she and her brother were playing one afternoon, he with a toy fire truck and she with an abandoned set of keys she had found. I suppose it was inevitable that eventually the metal keys would find their way into the exposed electrical socket, that sparks would fly, little fingers would get scorched black, that piercing screams would bring me running into the same room from which her brother was fleeing (expecting that he might be blamed for the incident), and this would be forged indelibly as one of her very first memories. Later I asked her why she had put the keys in the electrical outlet. “To see what would happen.” Of course.

We lived in that house the year that she so desperately wanted a tricycle for her birthday. A red one. With a bell. I tried to explain that there wasn’t a lot of money for tricycles right now and offered some other (less expensive) options. What I knew was that there was NO money for a tricycle. And while we fretted and worried, she prayed for a red tricycle with a bell. I knew that this was going to end badly, and I was heartsick over her impending disappointment. The house had a big front porch and it was on that porch on Ohio Street in Lawrence, Kansas, that God showed up one March morning. Paul left for work and when he hit the porch he turned back, taking the stairs two at a time. “Tabi, come outside!! You have to see this!!” And there it was. A bright, shiny, red tricycle. With a bell. And tied to the handlebar was a tag which read. “To Tabi. From Jesus.” She had prayed every night, we had said nothing to anyone, so…. where. . . And then we noticed the little girl standing next to us with tears spilling down her face as she stared wide-eyed at that tag. “Oh no,” she cried.” What could possibly be the problem? Isn’t this exactly what she had wanted? Her bottom lip trembled. “Jesus was here. And I missed him.”

And since that day I have always wanted to be like that little girl who yearned for the giver rather than the gift. We did our best to explain to her that sometimes Jesus uses people to be his hands and his feet and that this time he had asked somebody else to deliver his gift to her. And maybe this is why, from that day to this, she has sought to be the hands and feet of Jesus to others – anticipating and meeting needs in an almost supernatural way. A sidenote: it was not until two decades later that I ran across that tag in Tabi’s babybook and recognized the handwriting as someone who, for years now, has been one of my closest and dearest friends. Whether we called her Amy Oliver, AO, Amy Patton or just Amy, she has for almost 40 years been a part of our family’s stories and our lives. At the time I didn’t know know her well enough to recognize her handwriting. I knew her then as a young, single woman in our church (who also had no money) and who almost certainly, had no idea how far reaching her act of generosity would be.

Tabi could read by the age of four though I don’t think anyone taught her to do it. She just sort of picked it up by osmosis and maybe so as not to be outdone by her older brother. One day I asked him if he could recite the Bible verse we had been learning. He could. “A wise son makes his father glad, but a foolish son is a grief to his mother. Proverbs 10:1.” Tabi said she too, had learned the verse and would like to say it. I was ready to coach her but she put up her hand to shush me . She didn’t need any help. “A wise son makes his father glad. And a foolish son agrees with his mother. Problems 10:1”. I have always felt in my heart of hearts that Paul preferred this translation.

We went through a phase when we decided that the kids needed to learn table manners. So once a week we would fix a nice meal, set the table with a tablecloth (okay, so it was plastic) and flowers (maybe they were plastic, too) and everybody got a full table setting of silverware at their plate (which admittedly is a little sketch to give even butter knives to three kids under the age of seven), put on some music, dress up in our nice clothes, turn down the lights, light the candles and try to get through the meal. The idea was that if you gave them a challenge they would rise up to meet it. And so Paul would say, “Tonight, Mom and I are so glad to be dining with such ladies and gentlemen.” And then through the meal would remind them, “Oh a lady doesn’t blow bubbles in her milk. . . A gentleman doesn’t eat his peas with his fingers . . . A lady doesn’t climb on the table . . . A gentleman says, ‘Please pass the bread’ instead of grabbing it out of his sister’s hand. A lady doesn’t kick her brother under the table.” Finally Tabi could stand it no longer. She stood on her chair and demanded in her most authoritative voice. “TURN ON THE LIGHT! I WANT TO SEE THE LADY.” This lady would grow up to share more characteristics with her father than either of his sons did. She loved to talk cars with him and was the only one of the six who inherited his sense of direction. She was his constant football companion and spent many a Sunday afternoon watching the game with him (just ask her about her about Walter Payton, but not unless you have some time) and she shares some of his perfectionist tendencies. And of course, she has those blue eyes.

It seems she has always had a job – since she was eight years old. By the time she was 14 she was an administrative assistant and handled the day to day of operations of an office with such skill and efficiency and maturity that when people met the person behind the voice on the phone, they were astonished that she was little more than a child. She saved her money and bought herself a car before she was old enough to drive. She did her research and she and her dad poured over ads in the paper until she found the right one – a stick shift no less. She put herself through college, working full time and going to school full time and graduated suma cum laude from the University of Maryland. And all the while she continued to love and to serve and to care for her family and her friends and strangers – to be the hands and feet of Jesus. Because she doesn’t know any other way to be.

She is a first grade teacher who, like all good teachers, does more than show up for her shift. She has loved so many six year olds over the years and taken them into her life, her heart and her prayers. She nurtures them, accepts them, celebrates them, challenges them and makes a real and lasting difference in their lives. I am in awe at how she continues to give so much, to show up and be present with them day after day, how she gives hours of her own time because there is no way to get it all done in the work day, and most of all I am in awe at how she loves them and just keeps showing up for them.

And of course you can’t tell her story without telling about the little people (some of them now grown big) who call her Aunt Tabi and who love her to the moon and back as she does them. One of the best gifts she has given to this family is her husband Jason and together they have captured the hearts of these nieces and nephews and been the hands and feet of Jesus to them as well.

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Our story would not be the same without her. And every year, on March 4, the memory of that baby struggling so desperately for breath comes rushing back to me; I offer up a prayer of thanks to the God who spoke life into her lungs and who brought her to live out His grace among us; and I hope she has changed her mind about the folly of agreeing with her mother. And I am so, so grateful for all of the ways that Jesus shows up through her. Happy Birthday, Tabitha!

Valentines and Birthin’ Babies

February 16, 2015March 5, 2024 ~ Sharon Abbott ~ 1 Comment

I was 21 the winter of 1972. I was a full time college student, a full time wife, a part time Dunkin’ Donuts employee, a soon-to be first time mom and it could have been me instead of Prissy who said to Scarlett in Gone With the Wind, “I don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout birthin’babies.”

And yet. . . on February 14th I was going to have a baby no matter what I did or didn’t know. I knew with absolute certainty that the baby would come on the 14th because when my obstetrician had said, “Congratulations, you’re pregnant!” he had also told me “and your due date is February 14th.” Which explains why, when I told all my professors the first of February that I would not be in class on the 14th because I was having my baby that day, they made the obvious inquiries: c-section? induction? And when I explained that no, but my doctor said the due date is the 14th so I will need all of my assignments ahead of time and will probably be out for several days, the kinder ones smiled and the rest snickered and some even laughed out loud.

While I had never really been a die-hard chocoholic, as this Valentine’s Day drew near I drooled over the elaborate boxes of chocolates on display in all of the stores and cursed my doctor who had threatened me within an inch of my life if I gained more than 20 pounds – seriously, this was the dark ages. But I made it known to my husband that I would be expecting one of those super large boxes of confectionery delights to show up in my hospital room in a few days and I didn’t care if he had to spend the rent money to buy it. I oh-so-carefully selected a Valentine’s Day card for him and wrote a sentimental and loving note in it since I didn’t want to be outdone by what he was sure to give me along with my candy: a beautiful expression of his gratitude, appreciation and love for the mother of his new little baby boy or girl.

Valentine’s Day arrived. I refused to go to class because how could I show up there still pregnant??? Later in the day we sat at our kitchen table. I gave him my card and he swallowed hard. “I haven’t gotten you anything yet. I thought I would bring it to the hospital.” “That’s okay,” I said barely choking back the tears. “I wasn’t expecting anything.” But of course I was. I was expecting a baby. And he hadn’t come. I was devastated. No baby and no candy. Could this day get any worse?

Lucky for me (and my GPA), we didn’t have to wait long. Paul worked the night shift and it was early in the morning that I called him to come home. “I think this is it.” Suffice it to say that my labor was long, it was hard and that due to the fact that I was pretty heavily drugged because that’s the way it was back then, I don’t clearly remember much about it. What I do remember is that I had no idea what was happening, I was scared, I was hurting and they kept chasing Paul out of the room. I also remember that eventually I reached the point where I could not go on. Only later would we learn that this stage of labor is called transition and that it is marked by irritability and a need for emotional support. And that’s pretty much the way it went down.

Paul: What can I do for you?

Me: Just hold my hand.

Paul: I’m right here and I’m holding your hand.

Me: But don’t touch me.

Paul: Okay. I won’t.

Me: Just hold my hand!!

Paul: Okay.

Me: But don’t touch me!!!!!

Paul: oka…..

Me: HOLD MY *#$% HAND!!!!!!!!!

And so it went for the next hour.

Finally they took me to the delivery room. My 68 year old mother and my 21 year old husband (who they almost didn’t let onto the maternity ward because the nurses thought he did not meet the requirements of being 14 or older) sat together in the waiting room. Finally the doctor left the delivery room to give them the news. He looked from the old woman to the boy and unsure of any of the relationships asked, “Are you with Mrs. Abbott?” They assured him they were. “You have a son,” he told my husband. It was February 16th. The day my life changed forever.

That evening Paul came during visiting hours (yes, even husbands were restricted to visiting hours) carrying a big, heart-shaped box filled with chocolates. This had worked out well for him. “It’s so good you waited to have the baby because now all the Valentine Candy is 50% off!!!!” Of course, by then the craving was gone and I don’t think I ate even one. But the nurses were grateful.

Thus began our journey into the world of parenting. And from that day to this I have lived with the revelation that if I knew nothing about birthing babies, I knew even less about parenting. Thank you to my first born for loving me anyway and for not giving up on us. And thanks for some great stories.

I think he was about six when I heard him explaining to his younger sister that when she grew up and got married she would have a different last name. She found this slightly alarming. “What would my name be?” “Well, if you married George Norcross then you would be Tabi Norcross.” “What if I married Mark Kennerly?” “Well, then. . . he said with only a hint of hesitation. “I guess you would be Mark Norcross.” Say what?

He was maybe four when he yelled to me from the bathroom one day. “MOM, COME IN HERE NOW!!” I came running, expecting there to be a crisis of unimaginable severity. “What’s wrong???” “There is a spider in here!!!” By now he was hyperventilating. And don’t ask me why I asked him the next question or what I expected his answer to be, but certainly not what it was. “What kind of spider is it?” I asked him as though he would know or it would make any difference to either of us. “I don’t know,” he replied. “But I think it’s Jewish.” I have no idea.

When the first Star Wars opened in the theaters he was five years old and like every other little boy in America, he lived and breathed the characters and the stories. . . for years. He drug his sisters outside to play, assigning them roles. He would play both Hans Solo AND Luke Skywalker and they would be cast in the roles of Leia ( the sister who had the braids that she could put into buns on the side of her head), Chewbaca (the sister who had a rust colored winter coat that he insisted she wear even in the August heat), and C3PO (the sister he wanted to be able to turn off her constant chatter with a switch). There’s only room for one director.

He might have been ten the year we gave him the book The Hobbit for a Christmas present. He read all that day and into the night, caught up in the world of hobbits and elves and dwarves and the Shire. It must have been after midnight when he came out of his room into the living room in tears. “What’s wrong?” we asked him. “Nobody told me that Fili and Kili died,” he sobbed. “Who thought it was a good idea to give a little kid a book like that for a present?!” But thus began his life long love of Tolkien.

He was 19 when he joined the Marine Corps. The recruiter came to the house to pick him up and watching him get in that car and drive away was one of the hardest things I had ever done. His stories from the Corps are legendary, but those are his to tell. . . and he does it so much better.

Except for this one: He graduated from Boot Camp on July 4th in Paris Island, South Carolina. The entire family traveled to his graduation. What we didn’t know is what we carried with us.

After graduation he returned home with us for a few days and then we sent him off to North Carolina for more training. A few days later we got a call on our answering machine: “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Abbott. This is Captain _____ (I no longer remember his name.) I am calling in regards to your son. Private Abbott is under quarantine at the Base Hospital with the Chicken Pox. And our experience is that in situations such as these, the Marine recovers better at home.” Translation: the Marine needs his mommy.

And then there is this. It was his fifth birthday. We lived in an apartment which was on the second and third floor of an old house, and I had sent him up to my bedroom on the third floor to retrieve my hair dryer (the kind that was sort of a portable model of a salon hair dryer.) As usual his sister, two years younger than he, was on his heels because she followed him everywhere. He was lugging the dryer down the stairs and explaining to her: “Tabi, it’s a good thing Mom sent me to get this hair dryer because it is so heavy that only a five year old can carry it.” She nodded, appropriately impressed with his new-found five-year-old strength. “And,” he continued, “sin is so heavy that only Jesus can carry that.” From the mouths of babes.

My first born is now himself a good husband and father and leader of men.

It has been a long road from that day 43 years ago when I finally got my Valentine Card, my box of candy, and my son. And not always an easy one for either of us. But Jesus has carried us and our sin and His grace to this place where we are today, and for that I am grateful. And I am blessed to be his mother.

Happy Birthday, Sean! And have some Valentine candy. It’s half off!

because our stories matter

Once Upon My Story

birthday

I Wish . . .

Look at that Baby!

An Ordinary Life Lived in an Extraordinary Way

The Wookiee

In the Heat of the Night

Nobody Doesn’t Like Sarah Lee

This Is Fletcher Paul Avvott

Joy to the World. . . Every Day

Tabitha, Arise.

Valentines and Birthin’ Babies

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