Her hands shook a little as she tore open the envelope. She hadn’t expected a letter at all and had only hoped she wouldn’t get a phone call from someone in charge telling her to come and get Chase early. But here it was. And there was his signature.

Dear Grandma,

Thank you for making me go to camp. I’m sorry for that thing I said before I left. Everyone is really nice and I have a couple of guys I hang around with.

At first I was mad and wanted to make trouble and I did. I blamed another kid and we both ended up being talked to. The group leader who talked to us is actually pretty cool. We talk sometimes.

I love everything here. The food is great, especially the lunches. The cook is kind of cute. Don’t tell anyone I said that.

Canteen is fun. Rec is great – I’m awesome. Classes and vespers are really good. Fireside is my favorite.

We drew a target on that one boy’s leg and tried to hit the bull’s eye with spit balls while he was sleeping. He never knew! It was really funny!

I actually read the Bible you sent with me sometimes. I’m going to keep on doing that when I get back. At least I’m going to try.

I know I don’t say it, so I’ll say it now. I love you, Grandma. Thank you for taking care of me.

Your Boy, Chase

She knew her Kaylee would come through. That girl never missed a beat. Homework? Always exact and on time. Bedroom? Neat as a pin. Clothes? Perfectly matched. Sure enough, here was her letter. She ripped open the envelope addressed with hearts and curly cues and began to read.

Dear Mom,

It’s great here! I’ve made a lot of friends. I have to tell you (drumroll) I think I’m in love!  It’s the life guard. He called everyone out of the water and came just to see me on the campgrounds. Can you believe it?! What a sweet thing to do! 🙂

Some of the kids say it’s because I left my swimming buddy without telling anyone. Of course they’re saying that. They’re jealous.

We sing at the top of our voices every single day. It as noisy as gym class, only better. The Dean walks around smiling all the time. Somebody said he might put in earplugs sometimes. That’s just what I heard, though.

I asked the cook for some cookies to pass out in my cabin before we went to bed one night, but before she could give them to me (and I know she would have), my cabin mom came and told me she didn’t want crumbs all over the cabin. Something about chipmunks and what not. So what? Those cute little things would’ve loved a crumb here or there. 🙂

Well, I’ve gotta go. One of the kids got in trouble and another friend got involved . . . oh, who knows. Don’t worry. I wasn’t me!

xx oo xoxo,

Kaylee

PS Don’t believe everything Jessica’s mother tells you.

Pictures: enwikipedia.com

Finally! He opened the letter with a pocket knife. It would be great to hear at last from his son who had been away at camp for a very long week. No one could ask for a better boy than his son. Brown hair, green eyes, a zest for living; oh how he love his boy! His smile was so wide his face hurt as he unfolded the paper and began to read the boyish scrawl.

Dear Dad,

First of all, it wasn’t my fault. Please believe me. Not everyone does. Whew! Glad I got that out of the way.

The food is okay. Breakfast is best, then supper. Me and some of my friends told the cook that lunch could use a little work. I mean it’s only three meals a day. It’s not like science homework, for Pete’s sake. She pressed her lips together and her eye started twitching. I think maybe she needs one of those massages they advertise on t.v.

My favorite part of the day is swimming. The lifeguard seems pretty uptight. It could be from that one girl that they couldn’t find during the buddy check. He should get over it, though. She just wanted to leave before her friend. Like I said, uptight, right?

By the way, I have a mark on my leg that reminds me of the Target sign. My pants cover it up, though, so no worries.

Love, Dixon

His smile had faded with every passing word.

“Honey!” he called to his wife as he hunted for some paper to pen a quick reply.

to be continued. . .

Before we knew what was happening, she had us outside chopping wood. Using an ax was new to all of us except Sam. We had blisters in no time, and started regretting Sam’s turn into the barely visible driveway hidden to all but those who knew it was there. I heard Nigel gasp, and spun around to see Sam’s grandma swinging his ax like a seasoned lumberjack. Who knew the old lady could even pick up one of those things? We turned, zombie-like, to look at the wood pile, and at that moment it dawned on us how it had gotten there. Woa. Sam’s grandma handed the ax back to Nigel and told him it might help if he pulled up his pants.

“Lesson two. Keep private things private so you can get to what needs to be done,” she muttered as she started walking into the cabin.

“It’s chilly,” she called, “Hot cocoa for whoever wants it when you’re done.”

Well we all dropped our axes right then and there and started for the house. She was waiting for us at the screen door.

“When you’re done,” she repeated, pointing to the uncut logs and tools on the ground.

We turned around and spent the rest of the evening chopping. We actually got the hang of it and by the time we were done, we were not just ready for cocoa. We were ready for bed. It was 9:00.

What we had initially thought would be a quick stop for Sam to say hi to his grandma turned into a week. She always came up with a reason we needed to stay one more day. Instead of drinking beer and seeing things our mothers never intended for our young eyes to see, we ended up doing odd jobs around Sam’s grandma’s property; things like turning over dirt for a garden and planting seeds so small we lost half of them who knows where, and learning how to make lemonade with actual lemons, and how to shoot a gun and field dress a deer. Sam’s grandma had us take turns reading Shakespeare and Frost and Thoreau and Lewis to her after dinner while the rest of us listened as we stared into the fire. What school had never done for me, Sam’s grandma did, for it was then that I think I really began to love reading and thinking, both. We fell into bed every night by 9:00 and she woke us up with the prickly side of a broom at dawn. She especially liked whapping Nigel. After a couple of days he began to think it was as funny as she did.

That last night there we sat in the dancing light of logs chopped long before, maybe years before we had arrived. Sam walked over to her and told her spring break would be over in two days and we had to get back home. She reached up on her tiptoes and placed her cheek gently next to his.

“I know. Your mother called and told me.”

We did a double take.

“Grandma, when did you ever have a phone?” Sam asked, looking around.

His grandma motioned to me and led me over to a closet.

“Fred, would you be so kind as to open this door for me?”

I pulled the surprisingly heavy door open, and inside there was a little room, complete with a desk on which sat a cell phone and computer.

After a couple of silent minutes, Trent stuttered, “Wha . . .?”

Our thoughts exactly.

“Lesson ten: change is a fact of life,” she said quietly.

We were quiet the morning we were to leave. I couldn’t smile even when Sam’s grandma laid into Nigel with the broom. It felt like we were going from heaven to purgatory. The week had been filled with lessons like listening to nature clears your thoughts; and one that closely followed it, how are you ever gonna hear God if you’re listening to loud music; and one especially for Nigel, sleeping in makes you stupid; and animals trust people with kind hearts.

Sam’s grandma packed a lunch for us to take back with us and gave each of us a bear hug that nearly took our breath away. Last was Sam, and she hugged him for a long time while they swayed together in the clearing. Then she swatted his backside and he got in the car.

Leaning out the window he said, “Lesson eleven: Listen to your grandma.”

What a road trip: sixty miles and a world away. She smiled and waved as we pulled out of the barely visible driveway hidden to all but those who knew it was there.

Photos: www.goodfreephotos.com

The faint squeak of an old rocking chair caught our collective attention and only then did we see her. Her wrinkled skin reminded me of ruts in a neglected road, but it was soft and the color of honey and glowed like there was a light underneath that we didn’t see. Her not quite five foot stature was slightly stooped, but her step was sure as she rose and lightly stepped off the porch to greet us.

“Grandma,” said our driver, Sam.

“Sam, you rascal,” she replied, hugging him tightly. “And these are your friends.”

“Nigel, Trent, and T-ball.”

She hugged us each, and when she got to me she said, “I don’t know any woman who likes sports quite that much. What’s your given name?”

“Frederick Kellen the third,” I said quietly, my face growing hot.

The others chuckled as they did every time I answered that question which, fortunately for me, wasn’t often anymore.

“A fine name, Fred. I’ll show you all around, but first let’s get refreshed.”

She seemed happier than any eighty-nine year old I’d ever met, not that I’d met many of them.

Just as we were settling around the sparsely furnished cabin to the digest pork sandwiches, home-made sweet potato chips, and sweet tea she’d fed us, Sam’s grandma untied her apron and clapped her hands. We looked up. In the space of time it had taken for us to wander to our chairs and put our feet up; in the short time that we had taken to crack a few jokes and examine the rudely-made furniture; in the time we’d used to watch her fill the kitchen sink from a pump right next to it, she’d cleared the table, washed the dishes, and put everything else away.

“Lesson one: you’re lazy,” she laughed at the verbal dig.

We didn’t know whether to laugh or leave, but Sam didn’t seem disturbed by it, and he was our driver. We were stuck here whether we liked it or not until he decided to go. The road trip had been a group idea, one we’d dreamed up around the table at the school cafeteria, one that had grown from midnight texts and Facebook messages and senior year convictions about how we would live our lives without the restrictions of fathers’ advice or mothers’ apron strings or any other stupid restraints. Sam had always been the one who took our ideas and made them happen, though, and he had taken the lead in finding a route and planning things boys our age should get a taste of; things we needed to know about the world like strip clubs and beer and who knew what else. We were going to be men’s men. Nobody would mess with us by the time we went off to college or wherever it was we ended up. We were ready for it all. Well, maybe not all. We had no idea what to think of Sam’s grandma.

to be continued . . .

“We’re gonna die!” we yelled in unison.

The car was barreling down the mountain road at sixty-five. A spring breeze blew through the rolled-down windows, the radio was turned up with decibels enough to break the sound barrier, and our eyes squinted in the sun’s flashing pre-sunset glare.

It was great, this feeling of freedom; like flying or shouting at the top of a mountain. We laughed as we yelled and every so often the road twisted sharply enough so that we almost believed the top-of-our-lungs mantra we’d adopted on our road trip.

Bottomless drops became tangled montages of green brush that turned into rolling hills. When we reached a mid-point of the road, we slowed and turned into a barely visible driveway hidden to all but those who knew it was there. Brush on every side walled in the long path, barely worn tire tracks led us onward, the spring breeze that had blown our hair and stung our eyes in our race down the mountain now kissed our cheeks.

Ahead and slightly to our left it rested in the arms of the half acre of cleared land. We stopped, cut the engine, and heard something most of us had rarely heard before in our young lives. Complete silence, a deafening presence.

to be continued . . .

Photo: www.wikimedia commons.org 800px-Mountain_Road_in_Corfu-wikimediacommons.org_.jpg Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ;  www.freepublicdomanpictures a-very-steep-country-road-in-the-southern-appalachian-mountains_w725_h546-free-public-domain-pictures.jpg

They’d been hiking for hours. Sweat trickled down his face from the top of his hairline to his neck, a tiny drop detouring to touch the corner of his eye, momentarily blurring his vision. The intensity of the day’s heat had grown from warm and inviting to suffocating.

“How much longer, Dad?” asked his seven year old son.

He looked three paces back to Corbin. The boy was pushing a wisp of his strawberry blond hair out of his eyes. His freckles seemed to multiply under the hot sun.

He took a breath to answer, then paused. He didn’t really know how much longer. He didn’t know because he had insisted they wander from the trail. He had wanted to teach this little guy, the one who was too comfortable with quiet pursuits, that the world was big and he needed to match its wildness with strength of his own. It had been his idea to take this hike into the woods filled with blackened trees and matted leaves and heard but unseen animals so that his boy would learn about manhood even at this young age. A boy had to learn.

How much longer? As a father and as a man he had never been comfortable with acknowledging ignorance, even to himself. When faced with a question, he always had an answer, even if he really didn’t. Never in his adult life had he uttered the words “I don’t know”.

Upon first discovering their situation, they had hiked on and found the opposite edge of the woods. Progress, he had thought. They would certainly pick up a trail without the obstruction of branches to keep them from seeing far. They hadn’t.

“Dad?”

Corbin’s voice was small in the grand expanse.

He stopped, then turned aside to sit on a large rock near the path.

“Let’s sit down for awhile. Pretty out here, isn’t it?”

As their breathing slowed from the huff of hiking to the soft in and out of rest, a sound, nearly imperceptible, quenched the silence.

Corbin’s eyes followed the sound of a muffled whine, and he slowly got up and tiptoed to where he could better observe its source. It was a puppy, old enough to wander, young enough to need its mother. The mother trotted up from behind some bushes that grew crookedly out of the rocky soil. She sat, nudging the puppy, and licked it with her hot tongue.

“She’s kissing him,” Corbin whispered to his father.

The dog picked the puppy up by the scruff of its neck and followed the distant call of her master.

Father and son watched as the dog trotted off. He hesitated, then reached down and hugged his son, kissing the top of his head.

“Let’s follow them,” he said.

Photos: goodfreephotos.com, 1280px-Dog_nose Elucidate CC by 3.0 en.wikipedia.org Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

“I’m just saying that if everyone does what Norton’s is doing,” Julia swallowed, “there won’t be anyone left to pay the utilities.”

It had been nine months since she had first joined the coop, and Julia was sitting in their quarterly coop meeting. Since the coop had started, they had gained three new businesses.They were bound to run into difficulties here and there, she knew; but when she’d received her last utility bill, she’d nearly fainted. Three businesses had followed Norton’s lead and declared that they could not meet their utility payments, leading to larger bills for everyone else.

Caesar O’Swiffy cleared his throat.

“We all know that Norton’s had unexpected legal expenses,”

“From the lawsuit you filed on account of running into a stack of boxes,” thought Julia.

“And the other three had lower profit margins than expected,” he declared. “I suggest you just calm down, Julia. You seem, hmm, rather unregulated in your comments today. It’s bordering on hateful. What do you have against these four businesses anyway?”

Everyone turned toward Julia, and she sank down in her chair.

“Nothing. I have nothing against them. I just don’t want to use my profits to pay for their electric. . .”Julie’s voice faded under Caesar O’Swiffy’s gaze.

“I didn’t realize the depth of your selfishness, Julia,” Mr. O’Swiffy countered.

Members of the coop began mumbling to each other, but Julia didn’t stay to find out what they were saying. She wanted some chocolate, wanted it now, and the candy dishes set out at the beginning of the meeting were empty.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Julia stared at the wall wondering how everything could have gone so wrong. After the meeting three months before, the one from which she had walked out, things had gone from bad to awful.

A series of events including unexpected expenses with the meal programs had led to her finding it necessary to lay off some of her employees. Julia, herself, had taken a cut in pay and could barely meet her mortgage while she juggled bills from the coop. As it was, she was eating breakfast and lunch at work to save on personal grocery expenses, and her cat refused to eat the generic cat food she was now buying and most days had taken to hiding under the couch. 

Her alarm woke her gently, as always, but each morning she had begun to feel alarmed at the sound of it. Allmart employee morale had sunk to an all time low, and although Mr. O’Swiffy had tried to encourage and support Julia by increasing her allotment of Dove Chocolates, Allmart became a place where dissatisfaction was palpable.

There was a knock at the door, and Lexie stepped in quietly.

“Thank you for hiring me back,” she said as she sat some papers down on Julia’s desk.

Julia waved away her thanks.

“I shouldn’t have fired you in the first place. You were – are – one of my best workers. It’s just when Mr. O’Swiffy kept suggesting things about you, I lost my focus.”

Lexie nodded imperceptibly.

Julia looked at Lexie who looked steadily back at her. She opened the store account book and threw up her hands.

“Look at this! I don’t even know where to start. I feel like I don’t know anything about running a business anymore! And, and I’m losing my self-respect,” she finished softly.

Julia jumped up, bumping her knee on her drawer.

“This is where the trouble started,” Julia mumbled as she caught sight of a Dove caramel milk chocolate just inside the barely opened drawer. “Mr. O’Swiffy offered chocolate provided by the coop . . .”

“I miss your cookies,” interrupted Lexie.

Julia sat back down in her chair, the cushioned desk chair, the one where she belonged as owner of Allmart.

“Maybe I need to withdraw membership from the coop.”

Lexie looked hopeful.

“It was such a good idea, though. I hate the thought of losing those connections.”

“Must they be lost if you aren’t in the coop?” Lexie answered, raising her eyebrows.

“Maybe if we hired a different accountant, one who sticks to accounting,” Julia pondered softly, reaching for her phone, “though I do love it when Mr. O’Swiffy brings me chocolate.”

As she picked it up, something new dawned on Julia; or maybe she had known it all along. She would always love chocolate with a love bordering on desperation. There would be days when chocolate would be just the thing to carry her through until she got home to the soft cuddles of her cat (although at this point it would take at least a month of coaxing to get it back to its former self). But as wonderful, alluring, and oh so amazing as chocolate was, there was something it wasn’t. Necessary. And on those days when Julia could almost believe it was, it was not necessary for someone else to give it to her. She would find a way or make one to get it herself.

The clerk behind the counter at Allmart waved cheerfully to Julia as she stepped over the threshold of the store. She nodded an acknowledgement and headed straight to her office. She nodded, because that was what was allowed. If she had waved, it could have been interpreted as something other than a greeting according to the manual adopted by the coop three months ago. Heaven forbid she stop to chat. Julia stopped the thoughts strolling through her mind. No, she told herself, she would not be negative about a regulation intended for her own protection.

It had been exactly six months since her first meeting with Caesar O’Swiffy. The first delivery of chocolate had been wonderful, and it really perked up the entire staff. Julia was glad she had joined the business coop. Mr. O’Swiffy, their accountant, seemed like a dream come true.

The fourth week after that first chocolate delivery had been icy, and three employees were in fender benders; one, a rear end bump at a stop sign, and the other two, minor crashes on side streets. Julia, herself, had had a near miss. So when their accountant had suggested providing transportation to workers who faced some difficulty getting to work, everyone in the coop had agreed. It was worth it to keep their employees safe and, besides, it would minimize hours missed due to taking care of car repairs.

That icy week had made everyone hesitant to make the short run to the McDonald’s down the street over their lunch breaks and those who hadn’t packed a lunch had gone without. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. There was chocolate in the break room, and some of them had a few pieces. The next coop meeting had resulted in a lunch provision to employees. Breakfast soon followed.

With the provisions had come more paperwork, though. Julia had found every increasing demands on her time to follow coop regulations and to record any deviations from them.

Julia looked up at the sound of a knock on her door.

“The mail came early,” Julia’s assistant, Lexie, said as she walked into the office. “Umm, let’s see, not much here except a few flyers and something from the business coop. The electric and water bills are usually here by now. Would you like me to make some calls and see what’s holding them up?”

“No, Mr. O’Swiffy said we would get a lower rate if the businesses in the coop were billed all together, so the coop is taking care of it now. You have to admit it’s more streamlined.”

Julia slit open the coop’s envelope with her letter opener. She held the contents up for Lexie.

“See? Here are those bills. We just pay the coop instead of the electric and water companies now.”

Lexie bent over and peered at the multiple lines in small print.

“What’s this?” she asked, pointing.

“It’s the charge for the coop to pay the bills.”

“And this?” persisted Lexie pointing to another line.

“That’s the charge to help any business in the coop should they they fall short a month.”

“Doesn’t that negate your savings?” Lexie asked under her breath.

Julia laughed.

“You’d better not let Mr. O’Swiffy hear you. He’d be offended. This is his baby, you know.”

“Hear what?” asked Mr. O’Swiffy as he entered Julia’s office and tossed a Dove sea salt caramel dark chocolate on her desk.

Picking it up and unwrapping it, Julia thought that she could find it in her heart to love this man.

Lexie quickly left as Julia answered, “I was just explaining about the utility charges arrangement.”

Caesar O’Swiffy massaged his back and carefully sat in the chair in front of Julia’s desk.

Julia jumped up.

“How’s your back, Mr. O’Swiffy? I heard you had a run in with a stack of boxes. Here, take my chair. It’s padded.”

The accountant moved to Julia’s chair as Julia sat in the one she reserved for office visitors.

“Thank you, Julia. Yes, it was at Norton’s Grocery during inventory.”

“Why were you there during . . .” Julia began, but Caesar O’Swiffy cut her off.

“I think it’s important, Julia, that the staff is made aware of expectations. That,” Caesar O’Swiffy waved in the direction of the door through which Lexie had recently left, “assistant needs to be reprimanded for her lack of support for our efforts.”

“Oh Lexie’s fine. She’s always been a great employee and is an excellent assistant,” Julia replied.

“Hmmm, we shall see,” Mr. O’Swiffy countered. “Our efforts here are only because we want to make things easier on everyone. Don’t you want to make things easier?”

“Of course!” Julia assured him. No one had ever accused her of a lack of compassion and no one ever would.

“Everyone needs to be supportive. A house divided against itself, well you know the rest. It’s employees like that who bring everyone else down.”

“Lexie has never broken a rule, Mr. O’Swiffy,” Julia defended her assistant.

“Rules can be broken in thought as well as deed,” Caesar O’Swiffy cautioned her.

He placed a stack of papers on Julia’s desk and stood.

“I’ll be back next week to check on staff compliance,” he said, tapping his finger on the papers he’d brought.

Julia stood as he left, then sat back down, then realized she was sitting on the wrong side of her desk.

to be continued . . .

It was going to be one of those days, she thought; a day when chocolate would be more than a treat. Chocolate would be a necessity. First of all, she had slept through her alarm clock which wasn’t alarming in the least. It clicked on the radio that told her the news and the weather and offered a song or two. Today those voices had seeped into her dreams, and she had dreamed of a train crashing into a burglar and a state legislator who were having a heated argument while it rained sporadically. Then she had burned her ear with her curling iron, spilled coffee on the cat, and stepped in a puddle walking from her car to Allmart, a store her great-grandfather had started.

He had opened it under the family name, but for reasons still unclear to her, her father had decided to change the store’s name to something more generic and all-encompassing. It was an average store, but it was under her management, and Julia felt a sense of pride over the variety it offered and customer service it provided. Sure, there were larger stores of its kind and smaller ones, too. But this was the one where Julia had learned about business. This was the one for which she was responsible. This was the one she owned. She was satisfied.

Caesar O’Swiffy peeked his head into her office as he knocked lightly on the door.

Seeing him, Julia stood quickly, bumping her knee on a not quite closed desk drawer.

“Mr. O’Swiffy! I didn’t realize you were coming today,” she said, surreptitiously glancing at her desk calendar.

Caesar O’Swiffy softly laughed in his low, reassuring voice.

“Please. Have a seat,” she said as he shook her hand and sat in the chair across from her desk.

He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a Dove caramel milk chocolate, tossing it on her desk. He had remembered she liked chocolate.

“Actually, our meeting was scheduled for next week, but I happened to be in the area  and thought I’d see if we might go over the books today.”

He said it in a way that sounded like the most reasonable request in the world.

It was the most reasonable request in the world.

Julia made a quick phone call to her assistant and assured the accountant hired by the newly formed business cooperative she had joined that they could, indeed, move the meeting.

She cleared off a table in the conference room while she made fresh coffee and as the lovely caramel chocolate melted in her mouth.

The meeting had gone smoothly and was over in less time than Julia had anticipated. It would be nice to have a second set of eyes look things over, especially at tax time. Mr. O’Swiffy had quickly gone over the store’s profits and losses and commended her on her management skills.

“One thing, Julia,” he said after they had returned to her office and settled into their respective chairs. “I noticed there isn’t much for the staff.”

“Much . . .?” Julia attempted to follow Mr. O’Swiffy’s train of thought.

“Oh, you know, something to keep them happy in the break room. For instance, do you think a few packages of chocolates every week would perk people up a bit?” He laughed and gestured out the window. “Especially on a day like today!”

Julia followed his gaze. The rain was coming down steadily now. It made her long for the warmth of her living room. She wished her cat was there to jump into her lap like a purring blanket. Chocolate would be wonderful. She had thought so, herself, this very morning.

“I agree it would be a nice addition, Mr. O’Swiffy, but I need to count costs here as you saw from the books. I do bring in cookies every once in a while, and the employees seem to like that,” she offered.

“Oh, Julia. There’s no need to worry about it yourself. I’ll just enter it as a regular delivery from the coop.”

“You can do that?”

Julia’s heart lifted in a way it hadn’t all morning.

“I can do anything and I will. For you, Julia. We want to keep everyone happy,” Mr. O’Swiffy reassured her as he stood.

He started for the door, then turned.

“I nearly forgot. You will need to sign here,” he pointed to a line on a paper he quickly pulled from his briefcase, “to authorize it.”

“Of course,” Julia replied, signing on the line indicated.

As the door closed quietly behind the accountant, Julia sat back in her chair and smiled. Oh yes. Necessary chocolate. Just what the doctor ordered. And the rain began to subside while the sky temporarily cleared, just as the weather forecaster had predicted.

to be continued . . .