Dear John,

There was a girl named Sophie.

Some days, in autumn, I see a leaf dance pass in the wind, and wonder where it will be taken by the hands of the breeze. In a sense, we are all leaves, swirling through waving fields by gusts and gasps. We are separate from the same tree, but we never fly the same paths. Some land quicker than others, some are lost in the skies, and some never seem to stop.

I wonder where Sophie’s breeze has exhaled and inhaled her to.

Being a special necessities child, it was never easy for Sophie to fly very high. Mentally and emotionally impaired, she did not fit in with the rest of her classmates. As most students added and subtracted, spelled and corrected, Sophie would sit with the instructor, incapable to complete even the simplest tasks. She would, instead, attempt to scale the chalkboard, barking like a dog and throwing markers and crayons like grenades and anyone unfortunate enough to deserve it-in her mind.

Understandably, it would be difficult to raise this child. A mother would have to be miraculously patient and careful with such a daughter. Sophie’s mother gave birth to six other children, demanding astounding responsibility to mother them all. Instead of seizing this obstacle, the mother moved away with all her children except for Sophie, abandoning her at Sophie’s grandparents’ home.

Imagine watching your entire family desert you because of your inabilities and handicaps. Imagine your mother holding six small hands-everyone’s but yours. Picture your new home-scarred with poverty and neglect, which you would live in, to be raised by eighty-something year old grandparents. Which causes the deeper gash, your mental handicap, or your fleeing family? Or maybe they walk together, deepening one another’s pain on your soul. Maybe the cuts all overlap, and you live in the middle, the axis where all incisions cross.

Christmas approaches slowly, as it always does. Word circulates through town that Sophie does not have much of a holiday in store for her; yet another pain she is forced to suffer. She must have known, and she must have wept, for as most students adorned façades of good behavior she became sullen and unpredictable. Her pain must have rapt on the calloused doors of faculty hearts, for a small congregation of teachers, including the principal, went shopping for Sophie’s Christmas.

An older, rotund grandfather and a younger man, both unrelated to Sophie, pack a snow covered station wagon with gifts of various sizes, brightly wrapped with ribbons and paper, almost pouring out of the windows. The wheels slowly began to turn on the icy Michigan roads, and the Chevrolet Sleigh was on it’s merry way.

Upon arriving at the home Sophie resided, I can only imagine, painfully, what it looked like. It was described as a cold house, with walls so thin you could see through them in places. With floors that exposed dirt and grass in certain rooms. With a few candles and fewer lights flickering inside.

Now imagine living in such a frigid home, forgotten, alone, and beyond poor. Suddenly you open the knock on your door to find a fabled Santa Claus, with accompanying assistance, on your frozen porch to bring Christmas to your deserted granddaughter. Perhaps the snow buried you, and the icicles ominously caged you in, but you are filled with such an immense warmth that they melt away from your care.

I share this because it has only just been shared with me. For me, I am torn between two paths. Would I dress as Santa, putting on such a persona and drive to an unknown home to give presents and gifts from numerous generous hearts? Would I take the easiest path, with the least stones, least obstacles, least fallen trees covering the road and depart from certain trials God calls us to face? It is a godless question, who would you be? Would you try to relieve this poor child of her pain, or would you just try to escape your own pain? I only hope I would have the courage to start a metallic sleigh, with a two hundred horses pulling it’s rubber tracks forward.

All lives jump up and fall down as the wind decides. All lives float on. We all wonder where that leaf floated on to, but we all know that it danced with the clouds that one cold Christmas Eve.

With abundant and unending love,

adlai.