Walking past the house of Kellyanne's family, Jan and I noticed that large green bows had been wrapped around the trunks of trees in their yard and in the community garden across the street--a take on the "yellow ribbons around the old oak tree."
We'd just heard from two sources that two of the eleven still-missing girls had been found in a tree in Comfort, miles from the camp--a story we were about to learn wasn't true. Improbable as it was, we were so hopeful for those few minutes. We could picture the family coming home intact, seeing the neighborhood wrapped in Cambridge Elementary green.
The two women (friends of Kellyanne's mother) were moving down the street, wrapping more trees. When they saw how moved we were by their project, they gave us each a green plastic tablecloth from the Dollar Tree, so that we could wrap our own.
Jan shared a comment a woman at her church had made: "Kellyanne is now our girl, our daughter, our granddaughter."
What if she's safe? what if she comes home? what if we can now get to watch her grow up?
She's everybody's girl.
Every day in Gaza, in Ukraine, and in war-battered places all over the globe, children die, starve, disappear, and suffer in ways we can't even imagine.
What if we had the capacity to feel that every one of those children are "ours"?
No human mind is capacious enough to hold them all. But what if?
When the worst happens, it's human nature to imagine our daughters, our granddaughters, in the same peril.
To see our girl's father on the news, searching desperately through rubble and saying, "She's got to be here!" how can we not weep? He's one of us, he's our son, broken in the worst possible way.
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