Storytelling...

Just before supper, she walks out to the deck to inspect the plants. Still nothing growing in the pots containing the flower seeds. Something catches her eye as she glances at the mini-greenhouse containing the herbs. “Could it be?” she thinks. There, in the corner of the soil is a tiny speck of green, a seed, unfolding itself heavenward. “Wow!”

She is excited. It seems silly to her to be so excited about a little seed sprouting. But, she is and even more so is astounded that she had somehow played a part in this tiny beginning of life. She can hardly wait to show her daughter and grabs the kids’ baby books, the ones with the sonogram pictures of when they were just tiny specks of life. She wants to tell the children how they came to be in the world, just as they are witnessing the beginnings of life in the soil, in the pots, on the deck.

“Come here Ana, I want to show you something.”

“What?” the little girl replied.

She lifts Ana up and points to where the tiny stalk is barely visible, pushing out of the dark soil toward warmth and light.

“Do you see that little bit of green?”

“Yes,” Ana replies.

“That’s our basil we planted the other day. It’s growing. It starts out tiny, but just wait, it will be huge and smell wonderful if we take good care of it.”

“Oh,” the look on Ana’s face is incredulous.

“Now look at this,” she says pulling the pink book off the deck railing. She finds the first page, where the 6 week sonogram was pasted. “Here is Ana when she was even smaller than that little seedling. God saw that Daddy and Mommy loved each other very much and so he took a little piece of Daddy and a little piece of Mommy and mixed them together in Mommy’s tummy. Then, He breathed life into the new piece, and there you were. That was the very beginning of Ana.”

“Yeah!” The little girl replied, hungrily turning the pages in the book.

She explains the pictures on the pages, parties for Mommy before Ana was born, ink stamps of her tiny feet. They hold up her little girl feet to the baby girl feet. Ana’s big girl feet were twice the size of her baby feet, “Look how much you’ve grown!”

“Yeah,” Ana says again. That seems the little girl’s only reaction to the pictures, besides the incredulous look on her face. Ana takes the book inside the house to show her Daddy.

“Look Dad! It’s my book,” she says excitedly.

The little girl spends a few moments trailing through its leaves, narrating the pictures. Ana is learning to tell her story.

Her mother thinks, “I pray I take good care of her, so her story is one of growing huge and smelling sweetly pungent, always one of unfolding from the darkness and stretching toward warmth and light.”