Jeffrey

I've spent my life loving little ones, and if God will grant my petition, I will spent the rest of my days doing the same.

Several days ago I found this photo hiding in my computer. It's a short drive back to 1979 when I seldom wore shoes. I preferred to wear my socks out on the street and driveway. My mom was a certified daycare provider and someone decided she would be a perfect candidate for an advertisement for new daycare moms. Thus the photograph. One of these children was a visiting neighbor.

The little guy in my arms if Jeffy. He was two, wild, and rascally. We loved him! Mom watched him from the time he was a year old until he started kindergarten. He would have turned 41 years old in February but a late March snowstorm closed school and Jeff went out on his snowmobile for an afternoon of what should have been teenage fun. Instead he had an accident and suffered a serious head injury. He died 26 years ago today when he was just fifteen.

I didn't know Jeff as a teenager. In my mind he's still a preschool child wandering about Mom's house with his "ratty afghan," but I think of him every year when those last winter storms of March dump a foot or two of snow on us and snowmobiles buzz down the road and across the fields. Somewhere his mother is aching as she remembers her sweet boy.

I looked at the photo a day or two ago and thought how I haven't really changed all that much from my own fifteen year old self.  I still hold and snuggle little ones in the very same way, they still know I love them, and I think somehow or other I actually turned into my mom.