She walked down the concrete path slowly, looking back and forth between the book in her hands and the landscape. I must be missing something, she thought. The frustration mounted as she kept walking. It has to be here somewhere.
She stopped and flipped through the pages again, scanning the words for another clue, some tiny moment that was captured by her mother that could point her in the right direction. Her roommate had said she was crazy to make this trip, but in the end her desire to have this one connection with the mother she had never met won out over her roommate’s insistence on sensibility.
The journal was the only thing left. Everything else gone in a flash of flames except this. Thanks to her mother’s wisdom to leave the inscription to the daughter she had never met in the front, the journal had found its way to her. Now she followed its clues, from one entry to the next, piecing together the life of this woman that had left her with a lifetime of questions. She prayed by walking where her mother had walked, literally, that she may find some of the answers.
Suddenly she stopped. That bench, that looks familiar. She scans her mother’s drawing once more . . . and sees it. Her tree. She walks over to it and sits down in the spot she imagined she had sat and started reading the words likely written under those very branches. I am going to have a girl . . .
