The Butterflies

Ok, so I wrote a short story for a creative writing class that I am taking and have gotten really good feedback so far, so I've decided to go ahead and share it with everyone.  I wasn't sure if it was any good or not, so I hesitated posting it, but the people who've read seem to really like it, so here it is:

The Butterflies

It was dark and rainy when Eva finally woke up that dreaded Wednesday morning.  She knew this day would come eventually, but she wasn’t prepared for just how hard it really was.  She had watched the cancer consume her five year old sister, Lauren, for nearly two years.  It had eaten its way through her tiny, worn-out body for long enough, and today was the day that Eva and her family would bury the little girl. 

Eva heard the rain pounding like marbles on the aluminum siding of their two-story house and closed her eyes trying to remember the vibrant, active little girl that Lauren once was before the grim diagnosis two years ago.  Eva had just turned 10 when Lauren was born, and she hovered and mothered the bald, chubby little baby like she was her own.  Eva was determined to be the best big sister ever and to try and make up for the alcoholic father and the mother who enabled him.  She taught Lauren how to ride a bike, how to throw a softball, and how to catch butterflies on her fingers.  Lauren always loved those butterflies.  Eva read to her, bathed her, cooked for her and did all the things that are usually reserved for mommies and daddies, but her parents defined the word “dysfunctional”.  Eva and Lauren’s parents barely even noticed when the nosebleeds started. Thirteen-year-old Eva wanted to punch her mother square in the nose after her wailing and uncontrollable sobbing when the doctor gave the news; Lauren had leukemia. 

Everything after the diagnosis seemed like a bad dream.  Hospitals, blood transfusions, chemotherapy, overweight nurses patting Eva and her little sister on the backs and telling them what brave little girls they were.  Brave??!!  Had those idiot nurses lost their minds?!  They weren’t brave at all!  They were terrified.  Eva tried her best to calm her little sister’s fears.  They spent hours talking about how good the medicine was, how smart the doctors were, and how God wouldn’t separate them until they were both old and gray with great-grandchildren.  Lauren believed everything her big sister told her.  Eva was not only her sister but also her best friend and the one person she could always count on to be there.  Their mother put on a good show, though; always sobbing and saying over and over again, “my poor baby.  Mommy’s here, Baby.  Everything’s gonna be alright.”  Their father just buried himself even deeper in the never-ending bottle of Jim Beam. 

The bone marrow transplant was supposed to work.  It was the perfect way for Eva to help save her sister.  The procedure was horribly painful, but Eva always promised Lauren that she would always be there for her and do anything she could to make sure Lauren would one day again be able to throw a softball and ride a bike with her sister and best friend. 

Eva was holding her little sister’s small, frail hand when she drifted into that final sleep.  She put her mouth to the ear of her sister’s bald little head and whispered one more time, “I love you, baby girl.  I’ll see you in heaven one day, and we’ll finally be together forever and ever.”  Their mother held the lifeless body of her youngest daughter and just rocked back and forth apologizing for all the mistakes she had made as a mother and vowing to do better if God would just bring her baby back.  Their father walked out of the room and pulled a shiny silver flask from his coat pocket and took a big swig.  He wandered outside in the cold, sat at a bench in front of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and cried.  Despite their obvious faults as parents, they really did love Lauren.

After re-living Lauren’s short five years in her mind, Eva staggered out of bed and shuffled quietly down the hall to the bathroom to prepare for what would surely be the worst day of her life.  She felt like a zombie, going through the motions of her morning routine and putting on the black dress and tights bought especially for the occasion.  She already knew she would never put this dress on again after today.  She wanted to burn it, so she would never have to open her closet and see this ugly reminder of this dreadful day.  Looking at herself in the full length mirror, watching the tears stream down her face and wondering how she would ever survive the rest of her life without her baby sister, she saw a movement behind her in the glass.  At first she thought it must be her mother coming to check on her progress, so Eva whipped around and standing in her bedroom doorway was Lauren.  She was no longer frail and thin or bald from the effects of the chemotherapy. In fact, she looked exactly as she did before she got sick only about two years older.  Her blue eyes sparkled, and silky blonde curls framed her rosy full cheeks.  Eva blinked hard a few times, thinking she must surely be losing her mind, but Lauren was still there smiling at her, her eyes full of love and life.  “Don’t cry, Eva” she said, “I don’t hurt anymore and heaven has lots of animals and butterflies, lots and lots of butterflies.  All different colors.”  Eva smiled and wiped the tears from her face, thinking how happy Lauren, her precious baby sister, must be to be living in a place with lots of colorful butterflies.  As quickly as Lauren appeared in her doorway, she was gone.  Eva ran into the hall looking around feverishly for any trace of Lauren, but this time she would be gone for good. 

That night, Eva dreamt of her sister and all those beautiful butterflies and knew that Lauren would always be with her in her dreams and on the wings of every butterfly that would land on her finger for the rest of her life.

Snow Days and Serious Cabin Fever

I love working for a college, and one of the reasons that I love it so much is that when the weather is bad, I don't have to go to work.  I can't possibly complain about having a day off from working in the trailer doing multiple job duties.  I worked for an airline for seven years and when the weather was bad, it was even more important that we be at work.  Somebody had to be there to handle all the displaced passengers. 

Arkansas doesn't really know how to handle snow.  They use sand instead of salt and I'm pretty sure the small subburb of Little Rock that I call home doesn't have even one snow plow.  I have lived here for a little over four years, and this is by far the worst winter I have experienced.  It's only the beginning of February, so it's hard to see any end in sight. 

Anyway, I love getting a free day off.  I'm salaried, so it could snow for a week straight, and I would still get paid.  The problem with snow days; cabin fever.  Being stuck in the house for days without being able to get out and do anything.  Sometimes my husband is home, and sometimes he isn't.  Either way I am starting to go a little stir crazy.  I am currently on snow day number 3 and am starting to go a little stir crazy.  I got out for about an hour yesterday, but the roads were ice and snowed covered, and I quickly came to regret ever leaving the house.  The temperature today is supposed to get up to about 40 degrees, so I'm planning an exciting trip to the grocery store this afternoon (that's that new thing called sarcasm, in case you were wondering).  Hopefully, a trip to the grocery store will be just the thing to cure my cabin fever. 

With warmer temps moving in, I'm sure I'll be back to work next week, and I will probably be praying for more snow days. 

Mein Jahr in Deutschland (my year in Germany)

I was sitting here thinking about my childhood and started reminiscing about the year I spent living in Germany with my family in 1981. 

It was only my second time on an airplane, and I was sitting next to my sister and some guy wearing a blue checkered shirt (it's strange the little details we remember).  The flight was so long, and we flew out of JFK, which was a nightmare.  Our flight was delayed for hours, and because we were leaving for a year, it seemed like we had more carry-ons than what would be allowed today.  The airports (the larger airports, anyway) used to have these chairs that had TV's attached to them, and for a mere quarter, you could watch about 20 minutes of a television show.  It's pretty easy to see the problem with the math here.  A normal sitcom runs for 30 minutes, so one quarter isn't enough to watch a full 30 minute show, so you just keep putting quarters in until you run out of money.  I was 11 years old at the time, so it wasn't actually my money that was being spent on 20 minute intervals of TV watching.

We landed in Frankfurt (I have no idea what time it was), and while we were waiting for our luggage, I wandered into a magazine store.  The Europeans are not as uptight as Americans are about sexuality and naked body parts, and I picked up a magazine that in the states would have been kept behind the counter in black plastic wrap.  The clerk started yelling at me in German, so I put the magazine down and hauled ass out of that store pretty quick.  I don't think I ever told my parents about that, so if they read this, they may be hearing this story for the first time. 

After a two or three hour train ride, we arrived in Stuttgart, and were greeted by Herr Rupp, who drove us to the apartment we would be renting from him for the next year.  His family was waiting for us, with apple juice and seltzer, coffee and the yummiest Kuchen (cake) I had ever tasted.  At some point I noticed that we didn't have a television, and for a kid who was (still is) a TV -aholic, this was a very dissapointing discovery.  It wouldn't have mattered much anyway, I suppose.  I knew very little German at that time, so I wouldn't have understood what they were saying anyway, but still...NO TV!!  What kind of barbarians don't have a television??  LOL

I should have been in the 6th grade while we were in Germany, so my mom and sister decided it would be best to homeschool me for the year.  My sister taught me history and social studies, and my mom handled math and science.  My dad was busy studying music and traveling to and from Frankfurt to learn from a famous German conductor, so I guess he was off the hook with the whole homeschooling Jennifer idea.  I can't remember how long the homeschooling went on, but at some point my parents received a letter from the German government stating that I needed to be in school.  My dad asked around to find out what school they should send me to, as my inability to speak German was of some concern, and I was eventually sent to a school that had quite a few children from Greece and Turkey.  They did actually speak German and were also in their first year of learning English, but despite the obvious language barrier, we manged just fine, and I ended up making friends with several of the other students.  I'm here to tell you, that the best way to learn a foreign language is to be put in a situation where you don't have a choice.  I picked up German very quickly and ended up speaking better than anyone else in my family, including my dad, who was our resident German expert. 

After a few months at the school with the Greek and Turkish children, I was pulled out of that school and sent to another school that was right next to the church we attended.  I honestly can't remember why I switched schools, but I liked my new school much better.  I had to walk to school every day, and the biggest problem with my new school is that my walk every morning was uphill.  I don't mean a hill here and there...I mean one giant hill from our apartment to the school, and it was not a short walk either. I loved this school, though.  I made lots of friends and my German just kept getting better and better.

One of my friends, Alexandra, lived just up the street from me and used to go to a farm every Monday to take care of a pony that was entrusted to her for it's care once a week.  She invited me to go with her one time, and I just fell in love with this farm.  It was called the "Jugend Farm", which translates simply to "Youth Farm".  They had horses, ponies, donkeys and a host of other farm animals.  All the animals were cared for by young people from 10 to 17 years old.  I went with Alexandra every Monday to take care of a donkey named Senta. The older girls who cared for the horses would sometimes let me ride, which was always the highlight of my day.  One day, we went to the farm on a Tuesday, instead of Monday and another girl, who I didn't know, was looking after Senta.  I went to Senta's pen and called her over, and this girl got furious and started yelling at me.  My German was pretty good at this point, but it was still hard to understand sometimes, especially when someone was yelling at me.  Needless to say, that was the last time I ever went to the Jugend Farm.  I've never been able to handle being yelled at by anyone, and being yelled at in a different language was extremely unpleasant.

I could probably fill a novel with all the experiences that I had in Germany during this year, but if anybody does actually read any of this, I don't want lose their attention by going on and on for pages, so I have one more story, and then I call it a night. 

In our apartment, the sink and shower were in one room and the toilet was in a room by itself.  The lock to the room with the sink and  shower was kind of tricky sometimes and used to get stuck every now and then.  Well, I had just gotten out of the tub and could not get the door open.  I started banging on the door, now getting a little nervous, and my mom and sister came and couldn't get the door open from the other side either.  This happened to occur on one of the evenings that my dad was in Frankfurt, so it was just me, my mom, and my sister.  My mom ran upstairs to get the super, but he wasn't home either and, as it turns out, didn't get home until the following morning.  Anyway, I ended up spending the entire night in the bathroom.  I slept on a pile of bathrobes and towels, and my mom slid my Conny comic books (German comic books about a girl and her horse) under the door for me to read.  The next morning, the super came down and was able to open the door, and I was free!  This is one of those stories that isn't funny at the time, but that you can definitely laugh at later.  We still talk about the night I got locked in the bathroom and had to sleep there.  Thank goodness I didn't need to use the toilet during that time. 

So, consider this installment number one about mein Jahr in Deutschland.  I have a feeling I'll be writing more about this again.

A good weather day can make all the difference

When I was a freshman in college, I had to take a psychology class to satisfy a core requirement.  One of our assignments was to pair up and conduct a psychology experiment, and my partner and I did ours on the effects of music on a person's mood.  I can't remember who my partner was, although, I do remember that we fudged most of our data and made up the results based on what we thought they should be.  It made sense that certain songs or types of music can change a person's mood for the better OR for worse.  The same is true of the weather, and this is not something that I came up with on my own, it is a proven psychological fact that a good weather day can change one's mood for the better.

Winter has got to be the hardest of all the seasons.  It's cold, gray, and dreary, but every now and then mother nature will smile down upon you and somewhere in the middle of January, there will be one perfect weather day.  Today was one of those perfect weather days.  It was sunny, there was not a cloud in the sky, and it was about 72 degrees.  It was a perfect spring day, and it's January 29th. 

I took complete advantage of this perfect day.  I did some shopping at Wal-Mart, cleaned out and washed my car, and went on a bike ride (motorcycle, not bicycle) with my husband.  Tonight, we went to one of our friend's house for dinner and two games of Pictionary on the Wii.  It was a good day, and I love good days!  Who knows how long it might be before Mother Nature has pity on us and throws a spring day into the middle of winter. 

Anyway, the weather made all the difference in my mood today, and it was so nice to have a break from the winter doldrums. 

Go Pack Go!

I''m not a huge sports fan, and really the only sport I watch or even care about is NFL football, not college football, just NFL.  My entire family is from Wisconsin, which makes me a Green Bay Packers fan.  So imagine my excitement when the Packers won the NFC title game and are now on their way to the Superbowl!  My beloved Packers haven't been to the Superbowl since 1997 when they got beat by John Elway and the Denver Broncos.  Now, I wish they weren't going to be playing the Steelers in two weeks.  The Steelers are one of my two least favorite teams, and they just played in the Superbowl 2 years ago and beat the Arizona Cardinals.  A few years before that, they went to the Superbowl and beat Seattle, so it just stands to reason that they are due to be defeated, and I think the Packers are just the team to beat them.  It gets tiring watching the same teams play year after year in the biggest game of the year.  It's even worse when they when year after year...I mean, how many superbowl rings do Big Ben and Tom Brady actually need anyway??  I think what really drives me crazy about the Steelers is all the "bandwagon" fans they seem to have.  I think I read somewhere that they are the most popular team in the NFL, and I know a few fans in Arkansas that have absolutely no ties to Pittsburgh or the state of Pennsylvania.  For some Steeler fans, it could be the appeal of the historic franchise that is the Pittsburgh Steelers, but if we're talking about historic football franchises, then they're should be a lot of Green Bay Packer fans out there, too, and I think that there are. 

Anyway, it doesn't matter which team you root for or if you just watch the Superbowl for the commercials, there's no denying that the Superbowl is the biggest sporting event of them all.  So, just have fun and if you don't have a preference for either team, then feel free to throw your support to the Packers....they're due for a win. 

TV, football and other random thoughts

I am actually curious to see if there is anybody out there that is even interested in reading what I have to write.  I think I have an opinion or at least a thought on just about every topic, and I can promise that anything I write will be, for the most part, grammatically correct.  By the way, I use commas.  I don't care what the new rules of grammar are, commas are a natural pause in a sentence, and I still use them.  See how many I just used?

Right now I'm sitting here watching the Ravens and the Steelers play in a nail biter of a football game.  I'm hoping that the Ravens will pull out a win simply because I am tired of seeing the Steelers go to the Superbowl.  It seems like it is either the Steelers or the Patsies (my pet name for the Patriots) that play in the Superbowl almost every year.  Frankly, it would be nice to see both those teams knocked out of the running.  I am a Packers fan.  My whole family is from Milwaukee, WI, and I usually tell people that it is in my genes to be a Packer fan.  I grew up in Virginia but only because my parents moved there about three years before I was born.  Anyway, go Ravens and go Packers!!!  I think that's about all I have to say about football. 

I watch a lot of television.  I have so many different shows that I must watch each week that it's a little ridiculous.  I have given up some of the more mindless shows such as "The Bachelor".  It was fascinating to me to watch these women go nuts over some guy that was basically saying the same loving things to several different women at the same time.  I always thought they must be nuts to think that they have that "special connection" with Jake, Steve or whatever the guy's name is, but who am I to try and judge how another person feels?  At the time, those feelings are real as is the connection.  I gave up watching the show because I found myself on the verge of vomiting every time I had to watch the bachelor and some poor, young girl go on a date that no real couple would ever or could ever afford to go on.  Have you seen some of these dates?  Helicopter rides, private concerts by Chicago or LeeAnn Womack, trips to Spain, Italy or some other exotic location are some examples of dates that Mr. Wonderful and Miss Perfect Body would have.  I mean, I have dated a lot, and I have NEVER been on a date like that.  I was happy with dinner and a movie.  Almost all of the relationships that are spawned from this show inevitably end once the happy couple enters the real world.  Anyway, I've stopped watching this show.  It's just stupid, and I'm determined to cut stupid from my life.  I love "Law and Order" and could probably watch this show all day long.  Actually, I have watched this show all day long before.  I will watch hours of "Law and Order" and will only change the channel once my husband tells me he's tired of it.  I love courtroom drama and the law.  I have always found the law so interesting.  I took a few paralegal classes once, because that's what I thought I wanted to do.  I eventually changed my mind and will just stick with watching it on TV.  I could probably go on and on about television shows that I watch, but that's not the only hobby I have.  I love to read, too.  James Patterson, David Baldacci, John Grisham, and Ann Rule are a few of my favorite authors.  David Baldacci is my recent obsession.  He writes stories that are similar to James Patterson's novels, but he grew up close to my hometown of Roanoke, VA, and most of his stories take place in that area.  When I'm reading one of his books, I can picture the beauty of the Blue Ridge mountains and the small mountain towns that his characters reside in.  I am currently reading "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".  I heard that it was an excellent book and that I wouldn't be able to put it down once I started reading it.  So far, that's not the case, but I'm not that far into the book, so it may get much better.  It takes place in Sweden, so, of course I have to pull out the world atlas and try and find the cities that are mentioned in the book.  I love maps and atlases and love to know where places that I read about are located in the world. 

Well, I think I have gone on long enough for one day.  By the way, by the time I finished writing all this, the Steelers have successfully defeated the Ravens, which I am not happy about, but my Packers are playing now, so I have only one final thing to say; GO PACKERS!!!!