Little Girl Lost

She was all alone.  Where did everyone go?  How could any caring person leave a little girl alone like that, out in a field, to fend for herself, against God only knows what?  Everyone knows children shouldn’t be left alone.



         She figured she wasn’t loved.  She had brothers and all, and a mother and father whom she knew cared for her, so how could this have happened?  She had nice clothes to wear and warm dinners on the table every night and lots of fresh chocolate chip cookies whenever she wanted them.  So why was she left alone?



         I didn’t mean to spill that glass of chocolate milk all over the kitchen floor, she thought.  I tried to clean it up before my mom saw it.  It was just so sticky and no matter how long and hard I tried to scrub the floor, it wouldn’t go away…the stickiness.  She watched as her mother angrily took the kitchen wet-mop and vigorously went over the floor again.  And again…and again. She promised herself she would never spill another drop of liquid on the floor again.  She stayed in her room as much as possible so she wouldn’t do anymore wrong things.  It worked most of the time.  Her brothers made up for her absence by getting into their own kind of trouble.

         But still, despite her being bad…why was she left alone in the grass that day?

                How could she have been so naive? That little girl, now an adult, found that picture again, many years later in a photo album.  It took years to understand that no one left his little girl alone.  Someone was there, the photographer.  She wasn’t so alone after all.