Hello, friends! I've decided to do something a little different to start out the New Year. Instead of using Tanner Olsen's latest prompts to write reflective blog posts, I'm going to use them to write some short fiction stories. Enjoy!
Today's prompt is "Continue."
Andi was packing
- or, at least, she was going through stuff, which wasn't exactly the same as packing.
She was sitting on the floor of her bedroom, surrounded by piles: keep, toss, donate. So far, keep was winning by a wide margin. After all, how could she part with her third-grade self-portrait that portrayed her with shockingly large eyes and a tiny nose?
Maybe her mother had a point about her hoarding tendencies.
Shaking her head, she turned to the next box. Old crayons, toss. Although she could turn them into... no, don't tempt yourself with projects you'll never complete, she thought. Next she found a crushed mobile that once looked like falling snowflakes, which she attempted to reanimate before giving up and putting it into the toss pile too.
Ten minutes later, she had added only two things to the keep pile, and she was at the bottom of the box. Andi was about to break it down when she noticed a wrinkled slip of paper stuck to the cardboard. "Hmm, what's this?" she wondered aloud, holding it up to the light. It read:
"My best friend's name is Andi,
And I think she's sweet as candy.
She's got dark brown hair and eyes to match.
In softball she's always down to catch.
She works hard and plays hard too.
She'll cheer you up if you feel blue.
No matter what, she'll always be there,
And she'll show you that she cares.
She loves her cats, her dogs, and me.
The best of friends we'll always be!"
It was signed,
"Love, your best friend forever, Erin Calloway."
"I remember this," she whispered. It had been an assignment in fifth grade. They had to pick a person and write a rhyming poem about them. She had picked her best friend Erin, and Erin had picked her. Andi had been so sure that Erin would pick someone else; her self-confidence was as low then as it was now. But Erin had picked her, and she’d been so excited about it.
Erin Calloway hadn't crossed Andi’s mind in ages. She moved away after fifth grade, and writing letters just wasn't the same as seeing each other every day. They fell out of touch pretty quickly.
She smoothed the paper in her lap and re-read the poem. "Ha, softball, " she muttered. "That didn't last long."
However, it was interesting to read that some of the things Andi held as important now, were important to her back then, too.
"She'll cheer you up if you feel blue.
No matter what, she'll always be there,
And she'll show you that she cares."
She wondered what she had written about Erin, and whether that still held true for her as well.
Andi was about to move to a new city and start her first "real" job after college. She vacillated between confidence and terror. How was she supposed to teach children when she was definitely not yet a competent adult? How was anyone trusting her with this?
But the answer was right there in the poem.
Cheer them up when they feel blue.
Be there, and show them that you care.
If she just continued doing those things, she would probably be okay.
Carefully, she added Erin's poem to the keep pile.
She could hang it up in her classroom, right next to her favorite quote about teaching:
"What a teacher is, is more important than what he teaches." - Karl Menninger
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