You Will Never Be Cold or Hungry

Once upon a time there lived a very little girl who was taught to read at a very young age for a very sad reason; if she could read to herself then the adults could do adult things without being bothered by the little girl. This suited the little girl just fine because the adults weren’t all that nice to the little girl.

There was a little white bookcase in the little girl’s bedroom filled with books. There were picture books from the time before she could read words, and there big, fat, heavy books they said she could read when she was older.

One particularly bad day she decided she was old enough. No books were actually forbidden to her, and she was very good at knowing and following the rules, so she pulled out what seemed like a very big girl book.

It was a white book with a blue and gold castle on the front, and the title said that it held fairy tales within the pages. It took two hands to lift the book and lay it carefully in her lap as she sat cross-legged on the floor. She flipped the pages slowly until she saw a bird. She liked birds. “The Ugly Duckling,” she read. And then she read and read, and cried a little, and read some more, and was happy that it had a happy ending.

And then she read about a funny little naked emperor, and then she adventured with tiny little Thumbelina and wished she had a walnut shell to sleep in with a rose petal for a blanket. She was very glad she had chosen this big girl book. Then it was time for bed, so she carefully put the book back on the shelf and promised it she would visit the next day.

She kept her promise and found herself at a story called, “The Little Match Girl”. Since matches were on her forbidden list, she was curious about this little girl and started reading. But this was not a nice story. This story wasn’t going to have a happy ending. The little girl in the story was desperately cold and poor and hungry and no one seemed to care. Why wouldn’t anyone buy her matches? Our little girl was very distressed and cried very much at the end of the story when the little girl died and went away with her dead grandmother.

She cried herself to sleep that night and thought that maybe reading big girl books was not such a good thing after all. And that night, in her wishes upon the stars, she added some new ones. She told the stars that when she grew up she would always be nice to little children, and her own children would never be cold or hungry or poor or sad. Oh, and also, she would read happy bedtime stories to them every night.

Many years later, after the little girl grew up and had two little children of her own, she remembered her promises to the stars. She was a little sad that she could not keep her promise about not being poor, but it was a comfort to not be cold or hungry. And, there were bedtime stories and songs every night.

The grown-up little girl and her two little children traveled every night beyond their concrete walls to lands with castles and princesses and talking frogs. It was a magical time.

And then one day, a new book appeared called, “Love You Forever”, and as the grown-up little girl read it to her two little children, she started to cry.

“What’s wrong mommy?” the children asked.

“These are happy tears,” she replied. “I just love you a whole lot.”

“Silly mommy,” they said.

The silly mommy read that story to them a lot. Often enough that the growing children sometimes asked, “Again?!”

And they told the silly mommy that she better not climb a ladder to their windows when they were grown up. That would be weird.

And the silly mommy smiled through her happy tears and very carefully never made a promise to not climb ladders to their windows.

The End