a note to our friends and loved ones

Dearest Loved Ones,

We all start out these letters every year with that inevitable glance backwards over shoulders that have carried the burdens of the past 365 days, and we all wonder where that time went, now so much water under the bridge of memory. For us, the year has had a peculiar heft to it, and as we draw to the close of 2010, our shoulders still feel the gravity of some of those amazing memories.

We have gained and lost so much this year--March saw us birthing our sixth beautiful baby into the world, completing the circle of our family in a dramatic way, while June and September stole from us a beloved great-great-grandmother and great-grandfather. Autumn gave us the gift of a cherished new closeness to a brother and sister-in-law, while October marked the beginning of the grandest and riskiest adventure of our family's small history, when we moved out of our rented home in a search for the ultimate irony: the open road and a permanent home, all at the same time. Two months, two national borders, scores of national parks and landmarks, and seven states later, we're inching ever closer to that elusive dream of home, thoroughly worn by the excitement of all the fantastic places we've visited since we last left our door jamb in the last week of October. The next few days, crammed in just before the last day of this momentous year, should see us crossing a whole new door jamb, our 5 acres in the forest where we will, Lord willing, hang our hearts and our hats, and the hats of our children and our children's children and beyond.

This new place represents so much for our family; it is an old house where we can get our elbows greasy with remodeling and renovating; we will bring home our very first family dog, and we will have room for the boys to grow into the spectacular young men they are already becoming. It's a place for Bonnie's artistic skills to blossom, for us all to get our fingernails dirty and grow something, to maybe bring to fruition (literally and figuratively) our dream of having a sustainable mini-agriculture of our own, a not-so-urban homestead community to share with friends and family. It's a place to re-learn the precious skill of spreading our wings after so long being confined to small spaces not our own, a place to begin to repay all the oceans of hospitality that have been visited upon us by those dearest to us during our time of wandering. It's a place of roots. It's a place to finally come home to.

There has been a song running like a soundtrack in my mind for the past couple of months, since this journey started, really. It sums up so tidily all that we've experienced and what it means for our family, and I have played it many, many times during the dark parts of our journey when we've been reminded that adventures by necessity require peril, and disappointment, and sometimes failure thrown in with the excitement and awe and amazement. It's a song by Rob Thomas called Little Wonders, and the chorus still raises a lump in my throat: "Our lives are made in these small hours; these little wonders--these twists and turns of fate. Time falls away, but these small hours, these small hours still remain." There's another Rob Thomas song that always facetiously comes back to memory at those moments, too..."I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell, I know, right now you can't tell..." But maybe the most potent song of all running through the soundtrack of our family's conscious this past year is that ever-blowing spirit-wind that always brings change in ways we can never fully foresee and rarely understand. And while our shoulders have creaked under the weight of transformation from time to time, our feet have also gotten caught up in that irresistible dance, and we have felt lighter than ever in the middle of our great heaviness. I guess we've found our ultimate irony in more ways than one.

We want to thank each of you who have extended yourselves to care for our family in the middle of the crazy--you have fed us, or sheltered us, or given us encouragement, or been a friend to us, and we deeply love you and are so, so grateful. There is no way, really, that we can repay the love and grace we've been extended, so we try to content ourselves on the wise words of the apostle Paul, who penned, "Pay your debts as they come due. However, one debt you can never finish paying is the debt of love that you owe each other."

And we owe you big-time. Merry Christmas!

--The Bozeman Family
Christopher, Teri, Bonnie, Ben, Isaac, Gabriel, Elisha, & Asa.

empty underneath

I'm tired.

I'm tired of bing puked on by the Spirit-Of-Christmas-Eternal.

Tired of having exactly 7.5 minutes to revel in the contrived fuzzy feelings of Thanksgiving before it's time to rush headlong into the next holiday.

Tired of the pressure to find-the-perfect-gift because that's somehow a measure of my love for the people in my life.

Tired of MeMeMeMeMeMe.

Tired of stocking stuffers and Black Friday and 3-story yard ornaments and the talking box in the living room telling me that everyone is happy and joyful and all robed in crimson ya-yas.

My family checked out of the Christmas crazies years ago, and every year, as the beehive of humanity lights up ever brighter with the frenzy of the season, I am more and more glad we did it. But I've been relatively quiet about it until now, and while I know that a lot of you will not be interested to hear what I have to say, somebody out there needs to be speaking out about what I saw when I began to take a peek behind the glittered veil of Christmastide.

Okay, so here's the challenge. Every scrap of advertising we all see from 2 months before Thanksgiving until the day after New Year's tells us all about the joy of the Christmas season, about how happy we all are while buying stuff and coveting stuff and making our Christmas lists and hosting parties and shopping shopping shopping. Are we really that happy? Is this really what it's all about this season? So think about these things the next time you're out:

*At the grocery store, all those people shopping for holiday foods for parties and gatherings...count how many people you see that look happy. How many smile? How many are in good moods? Are you?

*In the parking lot, how many people are giving up their front-row parking spots for little old ladies? How many people are smiling? How many people aren't in a mad rush? How many are enjoying the weather?

*At the department store, how polite is everyone? How polite are you? Are you feeling the love here?

*At the post office, how many people are happy and chatty while standing in line? How many look at you and smile?

Okay, so for some perspective.

*At the grocery store, how many people are scowling? In a mad rush? Frustrated with and yelling at the kids on whom they'll be lavishing hundreds of dollars of gifts in just a few days?

*In the parking lot, how happy does the Sally Army bell-ringer look as 3/4 of the people pass by without giving a donation? How many people are cutting each other off and cutting in for the best parking spot? How many people leave their baskets for someone else to deal with?

*In the department store, how many people are dragging their precious children along, exhausted and stressed to the hilt, to buy the *perfect gift* for someone else? How many cashiers look bored stiff and utterly apathetic?

*At the post office, how many people are standing, impatient and bored at the same time, overladen with gaudy packages to send off to people who will hate what they recieve and look for the first chance to take them back to the store?

*Finally, at home. How much time have you spent looking for that perfect gift? How much money did you spend, and did you even have it to spend, and if you did, was it really worth it? Will your family love you more because you bought them some pretty thing? Is that the best measure of your love?

We spend a lot of energy on this holiday. We spend a lot of time rationalizing that it's the season of joy and of giving and of spending time together.

How much of that joy would be left if the Christmas tree was empty underneath?

--Teri.

on the razor's edge

I wrote yesterday: "I cut my toes walking the razor's edge between faith and wisdom." That thought has come back to me over and over in the past twenty-four hours, and I think maybe it's because that's what really defines my faith journey: a walk along the razor's edge.

Or maybe it's a walk along the river's edge.

In trying to make tangible this idea, a lyric from one of Dan Fogelberg's lesser-known songs keeps playing in my mind: "Lo que es de Dios? Lo que es de mio? Lo que es del rio?", which translates as, "What is God's? What is mine? What is the river's?"

When we are faced with walking into the Jordan, it's an all-or-nothing proposition. Either we stand there on the bank and watch our dreams and callings eddying and swirling and finally dissipating away, or we jump feet-first into the current, never looking back or considering all the shades of what-if that might have been suspended there in the air, displaced forever by the motion of our jumping.

But that finite moment, hanging in mid-air, is where I seem to be so often stuck. The words of another folk singer, Cheryl Wheeler, begin faintly to wend their way into my conscious: "And is it wise or lazy, holding tight to what you know? And is it brave or crazy, searching...?" I'm always searching that space, sniffing the air, calling out the subtle shades and examining them one by one, over and over, until I barely see the river at all. All that possibility, all that glorious, frightening, pregnant what-if, is always pushing me forward, holding me back, mesmerizing me with its always changing form reflected in the brilliant swirling dreamings of the river.

I've always said, "If you're going to dream, dream big." I recently revised that to say, "Dreaming is scary and dangerous, so if you're going to dream, dream big." I think I'm a part of a Bigger Dream, and I think I'm supposed to jump. But my toes are bleeding again because the river's edge just became the razor's edge, and I don't know how my big, scary, beautiful dream, alive with all the jubilant power of faith, squares with wisdom. But then rivers never were very square, were they? Only razors offer that kind of hard-edged certainty, and we bleed our frustration when we try too hard to walk that line.

It's almost a dream in itself, feeling my feet lifting lightly off of that painful edge and arching with sudden certainty, straining towards the current for everything they're worth. I suppose there's no going back now. All the what-ifs are disappearing behind me and I am discovering that I am de Dios, and de mio, and del rio, all at once.

--Teri.

all we couldn't speak

I went "back home" last weekend for the funeral of my (step)grandfather, and wasn't surprised to see all the long-lost family members trickling through the doorway and standing in little huddles throughout my grandma's house. There were aunts and uncles and cousins and neices and nephews, brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers, and we all knew each other.

Sort of.

What surprised me was that the bottle-neck didn't start at the front door, even as all those people shuffled their way past the tight little entryway; it started on our tongues. I stood before two uncles of mine, brothers, whom I hadn't seen in a couple of years and hadn't spent appreciable time with, if ever, since my childhood. One I had memories with, one I didn't, but a casual observer would have thought that we were all strangers, searching for some spark with which to light the way of our dimly familiar relationships. That spark just didn't come in time, for most of us.

We stood there, drenched in the enormity of a loss that no one can really ever comprehend, grown by years of experience, worn by grief and triumph, having been transformed in our own ways by the events of our smallish lifetimes.

You'd think we'd have a thing or two to say about that.

But no. Even when we meet people we think about all the time, people who helped shape our view of the world, people who knew us well in our younger days, we fall silent and grope spastically for some meaningful thing to say. That hard eggshell doesn't even begin to crack with talk of the weather, or of the kids, or of our doing-fine-and-keeping-busyness. All of our career-talk and pleasantries bounce right off, and when the clock has ticked away on that small, precious hour of opportunity before we pass out of each other's lives again for God-knows-how-long-or-maybe-forever, all those words that couldn't come out stay bottled up, more potent and passionate and concentrated than ever before. That's how it is with me, at least.

So I couldn't look my uncle in the eye, or even shuffle my feet and cast a bashful downward glance, and let him know that I'm finding my voice as an artist, and that there were a few years when I was a child that his artist's voice made me aware that I might have one, too. I couldn't tell him that my oldest son might someday play the guitar like him, or that I cried the day that Dan Fogelberg died because I remembered my uncle singing "The Long Way" with my mother when I was barely old enough to understand the words, much less the meanings. I couldn't tell him that I saw the grief of grandpa Euel's death etched on his suddenly-serious face and that I understood the bond I saw there. I couldn't. I wish I could have. And I wish I could have told him that he's always held a special space in my heart where I keep my collection of heroes from over the years, all the formative faces, calloused hands and voices of wisdom that have helped me along the way.

I think I'm going to have to find a way to unstop that bottle-neck next time, at least slowly, before the chance is gone and all I couldn't speak becomes all I never did.

--Teri.

11 years today

My son Ben asked me a few days ago about the worst physical pain I'd ever experienced. Of course, the first thing to my mind was his birth, where my epidural failed to kick in and relieve the pitocin-induced contractions that racked my body for hours.

But then I thought twice. It wasn't the labor or birth itself that was so excruciating, but the pain from the(mis)management afterwards that made me want to die, and then almost granted my wish.

Ben was born at 4:29 in the a.m., 9 lbs. 10 oz. of red, grunting, gorgeous boy. I hadn't anticipated having to do this birth with no pain medication, and I certainly wasn't prepared for the rush of endorphins that flooded my body and my heart as I held him, awash in love hormones. That sensation was so powerful that I didn't notice at first when the nurses started becoming alarmed at the amount of blood I was losing.

But I began to be more aware of the tumult brewing when they began to take turns palpating my uterus to get it to contract and stop the bleeding, and when each successive palpation was growing harder and harder until I, who never made waves back in those days, was gripping the bed rails, crying out and begging them to stop. If I could ever imagine what violent rape felt like, that was my moment. Or maybe I should say those were my hours. Because this went on, and on, and on, for what felt like a small epoch. My husband was in and out, visiting Ben in the nursery, and I needed him like I'd never needed him before or since. I don't think he was fully aware of the growing gravity in the room, and maybe I wasn't either.

The hours stretched on until the sun out my hospital room window was high in the sky, empty syringes of coagulant were safe in their little red biohazard box, and I lacked the strength to speak above a whisper. Seven and one-half hours had passed and I had lost nearly 2 units of blood, an amount I would look back on later and shudder at the thought of, when finally it was decided to take me into emergency exploratory surgery to find out what was going on. I maybe didn't realize the seriousness of my situation, despite my growing fear, until my father-in-law gathered my husband, still-baby daughter, mother-in-law, and brother around my bed to pray. My father-in-law is a strong, tender man, and I didn't expect his words to falter and tears to fall as he pleaded with God for my safety. Something in my head finally clicked and I realized, though weakly, that I could be dying. I think I was dying.

When I was wheeled down the hall and through the doors that meant my husband could no longer accompany me, I realized a split second too late that I hadn't told him goodbye, and this terrified me. What if I never came back? I hadn't said I loved him one last time. I hadn't kissed our daughter goodbye. I hadn't kissed our new son goodbye. I called after him, but my weak, whispering voice trailed off into nothing, swallowed even by the small sounds of wheels and feet on linoleum. I was terrified, and drifted off shortly afterwards into the anasthesia mask, with that one last image burned into my brain.

I woke, vaguely aware that I was alive, that the pain was gone, and with a heart flooded with gratitude at the surgeon who had discovered and repaired my torn cervix. My physical recovery felt so slow, with fever, blood transfusions, and a baby who never knew the peace of a non-emergent birth. I went home a few days later, completely unaware that a seed planted in that hospital bed as I lay bleeding would germinate just a couple of years later and blossom into life-change, awareness, and a determination never to birth in a hospital again.

Four home births later, I can be grateful for that experience. I can be grateful at my own fear, at my cowardice during parts of that ordeal, at my total lack of commitment to my body and even to the precious life that came into the world amidst such tumult. I think the reparative work is still being done, but today, we celebrate. We celebrate Ben's 11th birthday, we celebrate how he's beginning to reach upward into manhood, we celebrate how far he has come in his life.

But in a secret corner of my heart, I celebrate something different. I celebrate my own birth on that day, when a woman emerged from the heart of a girl, having touched reality for the very first time, bearing that scar forever but also gaining a world of strength because of it.

--Teri.

thoughts in the deep of night

I've arrived here somehow, still oddly awake at an obscene hour and creeping up to the edges of thoughts that are too sleepy in the daytime to make themselves known. It's the time of night when the world finally gets surreal enough for my head to speak up and remind me that the goings-on up there involve more than the mechanics of my day-to-dayness, that there is a deep, quietly rippling moonlit pool there and a small me sitting at the edge, wanting to dive in and find out what's at the bottom.

Or maybe it's not really what lies at the bottom of that pool that draws me at all, but the sensation of swimming through it, the waters flowing through body and soul, undulating with the outward-moving memory of that first contact below the surface. Maybe it's the process, the impossible-to-describe feeling of getting back in touch with that part of my mind that needs the awareness of something beyond get-up-and-work-and-cook-and-breathe-and-teach-and-sleep, something warm with the aqueous promise of higher purpose and deeper meaning.

It's been weeks since my smaller self has sat at the brim of the moonlit pool in my mind, and it feels good tonight just to soak up the silence and dip my toes in again, swirling them around in introspection and wondering....
--Teri.

elisha's life on the run

So I lost my kid yesterday. Oh, and I'm due to give birth this week. He's not quite 2 and somehow escaped my notice for, ohh, about 4 minutes while we were at a friend's new apartment with another friend and all of our children, 11 in all, 3 of which are precisely Elisha's size. He trucked his little self down the stairs, out the door, and down the street; most of that time we were frantically looking for him around the apartment, and then spread out towards the great mortifying outdoors. After about 45 seconds, we saw a lady down the street crouching down and it ocurred to us that maybe she had Elisha, so I sent Ben down the street to check while I waddled with all my might after him. Sure enough, this kind lady had intercepted my mischievous toddler in the middle of the road, heading towards God-knows-where, and her first impulse (instead of looking around to see 8 children and a herniated woman running around like maniacs) was to call the police.

Nice.

So now I had to talk to the police, tell them my name, why my child got away from me and, dread of dreads, my location. They sent a car around to scope out the situation, and the lady-cop who came in began asking me the probably-usual gauntlet of questions, like how he got out, how it was I didn't manage to notice this, et cetera, et cetera. What she said and what I heard were, naturally, two different things entirely, so my rough translation would go something like:
"Are you an imbecile? Can you not keep up with a 2-year-old?"
"I should probably haul you in now for child neglect."
"What, your children are running wild through the streets and you're PREGNANT again?!?"

After this, she left, and I searched high and low for some duct tape. Unable to find any, I merely became incredibly irritable for the remainder of the afternoon, questioning my basic competency not only as a mother but as a human being and a citizen of Earth, and suddenly craving something very, very sweet to take away the bitter taste of my run-in with the law.

--Teri.

under and over: the cycle of motivation and commitment in my third trimester.

I really ought to be educating my children right now, but their bedroom floor is covered in biscuit crumbs and thousands of partially-sorted legos, and Elisha is trapped in his high chair in the middle of it all with a runny nose and sticky fingers...really, would you want to interfere with that kind of childhood utopia? Oh, and Gabe is bleeding from the knee.

I woke up with a sore throat this morning and so slept in for a bit and let the children do their own thing for awhile, and the resulting, uhm, harmony? is just a little more than I think I can tackle for the moment. So I'm escaping for a bit and writing down some random things for no particular reason. Isn't it good to know that these five precious lives are in such capable, responsible hands this morning?

Anyway, we have just about 8 weeks left of what is looking like our very last pregnancy. I imagine I'll always have conflicting feelings about ceasing to be a baby mill, but I've talked through it with my psychologically-astute husband and we've determined that 1)we're creatures of habit and have been in the baby-making business for so long that it's just going to take some adjusting to changing our pattern, 2) we're really good at this job (especially this morning, obviously!) and it's hard to mess with a good thing, like Oprah canceling her show after all this time, and 3) having kids has given us a false feeling of eternal youth, and making this our last kid is a stark admission that we're not spring chickens anymore. It's a lot to take in all at once, particularly with the wash of maternal hormones I've been high on for the last 11 years.

On the other hand, there are some strong motivations for not having any more kids, things like imagining having to spend our days in front of tv cameras on a reality show, the fear of being mistakenly called 'Mrs. Duggar' in the grocery store, and actually having been called a 'brood mare' in public at full volume. neigh. sigh. Oh, and the strongest motivator of all, of course, is the horrifying prospect of having to drive a white 10-passenger van (because white is the only color they come in, you know) for the next decade. That single thought is enough for me to line up 10 interviews with urologists for my husband this week! At least with six kids we can still cram ourselves into a Toyota Sienna, try not to breathe or fart on one another, and get ourselves from point A to point B legally.

So maybe it's denial, and maybe it's just my nature, but I've managed to completely over-commit myself for the next 8 weeks. None of this sitting-around-and-nesting-with-my-unborn-child business for me! Nope, before this is all said and done, I've managed to schedule:
*teaching a weekly childbirth education class for my kids plus 3 others
*hosting a weekly marriage class in our home every Wednesday night until Asa is at least a month old
*making a wedding cake for 200 people--in Pueblo
*helping my husband get ready to officiate that same wedding
*making Bonnie her annual dress for the father/daughter dance
*finishing the baby's quilt
*helping my local doula association with marketing materials and other such interestingness
*making a white chocolate castle for this year's chocolate contest (because I'm not going to let a little thing like 8 months of pregnant belly keep me from getting my dang ribbon this year!)
*Attending a post-secondary trauma workshop for birth professionals (hey, this could come in handy with all the post-secondary trauma I'm putting myself through with all the other stuff I have to do!)
*Oh, and somewhere in there, I expect to go into labor at just the wrong moment and have 10 or 11 pounds of baby to aid me in my adventures.

What is wrong with me?! And the worst part of it might be the fact that I just want to sit on the couch and bore my friends and relatives with incessant yammering on about all this! Well, the upshot, I guess, is that I've managed to inhale a few times now and might can trudge upstairs now and deal with what lies in the kids' bedroom.

Blood and crumbs, here I come!

--Teri.

on fear.

"...yeah, but what is it, really, that's keeping me
From living a life that's true?
When the worries speak louder than wisdom,
It drowns out all the answers I knew.
So I'm tossed on the waves of that surface;
Still, the mystery's dark and deep,
With a much more frightening stillness...
Underneath."
--David Wilcox, Underneath

I've been ruminating again on the purposes of pain and fear in our souls, what roles they play and how to master them. I came to the conclusion years ago as I prepared to give birth to my fourth child that pain has a powerful effect on us when we let it; it makes us immeasurably stronger when faced with all of our courage, or it breaks us down and shows us how weak we can be when it's not. It has been a powerful lesson for me and remains incredibly important for me, especially as I prepare to birth my sixth child.

But what of fear?

It seems that fear is a different animal entirely, more elusive, more difficult to control, and more threatening, whether real or imagined. It takes bravery to stare down pain, but it takes something different, I think, to master fear.

I've always been intrigued by the apostle John's take on the subject: "Perfect love banishes fear".

Perfect love.

Banishes!

Fear.

It's a lot to take in, if we're honest. But if we look deep into the underneath, what it is that ultimately motivates us to get past the crippling fear we experience? When all we have is an incomplete equation and we're forced to find the answer or to fail, is it not a deeper love that rises to cast out that fear?

So then the question becomes personal: how do I develop that kind of love? I suppose it's a discipline of the heart and of the mind, one that chooses to say,
"I'm afraid for the people of Haiti...but I love them more and so will not do nothing."

"I'm scared to take this huge, life-altering step and I don't know what lies on the other side, but I love more than I fear, and so I will not be paralyzed."

"Life can be dangerous and painful and even cut short, but to live is to love, and so I will live fully."

And what a strange, beautiful paradox that love leads us to such vulnerability that we can be so affected by fear, and yet is so much stronger than the fear when we cultivate it and take the risk to find out if our love is really strong enough to banish the fear, underneath.

--Teri.

my funny micro-date

About a mile from our house is a Pei Wei restaurant, and Christopher and I often take little dates there, leaving the kids at home for a bit so we can spend a little time together. The food is always good and hot, the floor is red, and you can eat as many fortune cookies as you want--and how sweet is that?

On Saturday, we escaped once again for our little micro-date at Pei Wei, and found it to be a super-busy afternoon, so we were scrunched in between 2 other couples at narrow tables along the back wall. No big deal. We had some things we needed to talk about, but nothing so heavy that it needed to be secretive, so we didn't mind it.

The two ladies to my left were talking about how much they loved Pei Wei, when suddenly one of them turned to me and said, "Do you two just LOVE this place?" We answered that yeah, we loved it, because it was so yummy but also close to home, etc etc. It came out that we had 5 kids at home, and then her eyes got wide as they came to rest on my rounded belly; she blurted out jocularly, "You're PREGANANT AGAIN?!?" At that point, half the restaurant turned completely around and stared at me. I waved, Miss America-style, and acknowledged that yes, we're pregnant again.

With the other diners still looking on, this flamboyant lady turned to Christopher now and said, still in an incredulously loud voice, "You IMPLANTED your SPERM in her SIX TIMES?!?" "You TURNED her into a BROOD MARE?!?" Christopher laughed and said something like, "Yup!" in a tone that landed somewhere between embarrassment and pride (mostly pride, as I later found out; when I asked him if he was horrified by that, he said, "Nope, with 6 kids, it's a little hard to deny!")

We went on to have a really fun and enlightening conversation with these two ladies and I even shared my shrimp with her. We talked about how she hated her one childbirth experience, how she hated mothering, how she wondered if we had fun with that many kids and whether I ever cry.

In the end, we didn't mind our date being interrupted or having the whole restaurant know that my husband is a stud (uhh, literally?!); it was a fun encounter and an unexpected twist to our day.

--Teri.

hearts aflame

I accidently set fire to my children yesterday.

It was really a school day like most others, only I was more grumpy than usual (woe to the children!) and just going through the motions of teaching. On days such as these, I generally sit loftily and moodily in my teacher's chair, coldly barking commands from afar and expecting an atmosphere of silence and contemplation.

What I usually get instead is a reflection of my own inner thoughts: broody, sulky, disinterested kids. Oh, the lessons we teach.

So when the fire broke out yesterday, my first impulse was to extinguish it. It started quietly enough, with an obligatory science lesson about the ocean. Then it turned imperceptibly toward benthos, and a faint flicker was seen. Before I knew what was happening, four children with tongues of fire leaping in their little heads were crowded around a computer screen, hungrily researching the most nefarious-looking bottom sea dwellers, yard stick in hand, ready to measure every specimen for maximum impact.

Somewhere in the back of my persnickety mind, thoughts of moving on to a math lesson loosened their grip and began to fade away, finally and reluctantly surrendering themselves to the flames, and I was able to let the rest of my school day be consumed entirely, a warm glow replacing the coldness of my bad attitude.

Thank God for small miracles.

--Teri.