Angels Watching Over Me (Shenandoah Sisters Book #1) Read Free Page B

not afraid to drink when she was here.
    Katie knew the birds too, and two gray rabbits that lived in a nearby thicket. She saw a raccoon once. But coons didn’t usually come during the day, and try as she might to come early in the morning and sit as still as a rock, the one she had seen never returned. There was also a turtle that sometimes swam about in the water.
    I wish you could hear Katie describe her special place in her own words. Katie was as much a poet in her own way as I am a storyteller. She wrote many poems, though she kept them mostly to herself. Her mother read to her a lot and taught her to play the piano and violin. I think people who can make music can also make words into music. Maybe that’s what poems are—musical words.
    I believe the feelings and observations that later came out in her poems must have been inside her way back when she was just a little girl. I’m sure it takes a long time to make a poet, with things going deep and taking root in the subconscious. It must take years for fancies to get nourished in the soil of imagination before they’re able to come out in actual words. Some of you probably know what I mean, because I’m sure some of you have written poems too. I could never write a poem, but watching Katie helped me understand it a little better. She was always observing, taking things in, living in her imagination, and like I said, feeling things more deeply than she let on, deeper than a practical person like me felt them. Maybe she felt things deeper than she even realized herself.
    So I like to think of Katie sitting by the pond in the woods watching for animals, not necessarily thinking about what was going on around her but feeling it, with the invisible music of poetry moving silently inside her even before she wrote her first poem.
    If she had known about praying then, she might have called such times praying. Some folks think praying happens only when you’re in church or are actually talking to God. But I’m not so sure. I think that when you’re feeling the silent mysteries of the world, and feeling the tunes that God put into it for us to listen to, and when you let His creation make you happy, then that’s a kind of praying too. But that’s just one old black lady’s opinion on the matter.
    One thing I do know, whether you call Katie’s times in the woods beside the pond praying or not, she was learning to feel a love for the world around her that eventually made her able both to pray and write poems expressing what she felt inside.
    I’ve always been thankful for this quiet side of Katie, because there came a time in my life when it would teach me a lot and make a better person of me.
    Listening to Katie tell about the trees and fields and the animals made you think you were there. I could smell the scent that the sun drew out of the pine trees when she was talking about it.
    On this day she set her doll—I think she was named Rebecca—down beside her as she sat on her favorite rock, then picked up a stick and began jabbing at a few pebbles and flicking them toward the water’s edge. All the while she was looking around at everything about her. And though she might not have said it in these words, I think her heart was glad to be alive.

A V ISIT TO T OWN
3

    T HE SUN DAWNED JUST AS IT HAD MANY times before during Kathleen Clairborne’s young life.
    She rolled over in bed to see its light slanting through her window. She gave a sleepy sigh of pleasure. It was Monday and no more rain was in sight. They would be able to go into town. Her mother had promised her a new dress for her birthday, but Katie had been afraid more rain might cancel the outing. Greens Crossing was six miles away. It was not a trip her mother made often, especially if the road was muddy.
    There was not anything unusual about this particular day. The sun had beamed into Katie’s window on countless mornings just like it. Yet this would not be like any of those other days.
    Katie would