The Magic of Found Objects

by Maddie Dawson

“No, no, no,” she would say to me. “Stop with that kind of talk. You’re at the beginning. You’re creating your reality, and the words you tell yourself, the story you believe about yourself, is the way things are going to turn out for you. You have to fill your heart with love for yourself, Phronsie. That is the first and most important thing you have to do. Everything you want will follow from that.”

grief is something you can get used to. You shrink it down, put it in your pocket, like a phone number scrawled on a piece of paper, and maybe after a while, you just leave it in your drawer and don’t carry it with you at all.

She said that practicality and duty were what built character, not this “airy fairy” stuff. Character came from paying your bills and working your way toward the thing you really wanted in your life. Character was who you were when all the rest was stripped away. It was the you that people could recognize and count on.

“I’ve enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand.”

Maybe she’s on drugs, I think. Some special potion that lends her an ability to see the grace in the family dynamics, the magic beneath the mess.

“Everything always works out in the end. And if it didn’t work out yet, then it isn’t the end.”