This is my post for #memoirmonday week15 Do you believe in miracles? hosted by @ericvancewalton
I think that it is a miracle that I am here, being born in 1956. My mother told me that she had a bad sunburn that made her go into labor early, she said that I was so small that they had to hold me on a pillow. She also said Dad had bought a new pair of shoes and I fit in the shoebox. I do not think many babies this small made it back then.
Growing up on an inlet, it is a miracle that any of us survived, we all fell off of the dock before we could swim, but by some miracle, there was always someone there to fish us out of the water. I remember when my youngest sister fell in. She stepped off of the corner with the tide ebbing, when she came out the other side I remember her eyes being as big as saucers. A man who was fishing reached down and grabbed her.
Many things I did as a kid makes me think it is a miracle that I am still here, like jumping off a bridge into the inlet, this photo was taken from the bridge.
This was the bridge while it was being built, when they had the two sides connected but not finished, they had boards lying across the open spots my brother and I rode our bikes across it with boards falling in behind us.
Or diving from the fish cleaning table into the shallowest water I could dive in, it was a game we played, who could dive in the shallowest water. Later in my life, I met two people who were paralyzed from diving into shallow water.
Swimming in the ocean and being caught in undertows, I can not count the number of times that I was rolled on the bottom thinking I was going to run out of air and finally getting out of it with every part of my body filled with sand from being rolled.
I was in a car wreck and they had to use the jaw of life to get me out. These were some of my miracles.
My youngest sister was on crack cocaine for 15 years, I thought the only way she would get off it would be a miracle, a miracle happened, she has been clean for going on 17 years now.
But I prayed and prayed for a miracle for my mother when she had her stroke but it never came. Yet I have to still believe in them because I have two children who are on drugs and I know it will take a miracle for them to wake up and see their friends who have died could one day be them. They lost two this month, I believe a miracle will happen for them because I will not even think of one not happening, I can't not believe.
