Her grandma’s love affair with Stuart was well known in Mistletoe Meadows. Although it had been years since Grandpa died, Nelly still remembered him with fondness. He always had a twinkle in his eye and a joke to tell, as well as a harmonica in his pocket, which he would pull out at random times to play a song and get a smile from someone.
She had loved that when she was younger, just enjoying the ability to pull a song out of one’s pocket. And that ability to give a smile to anyone at any time. She had learned a lot from her grandpa, even though she hadn’t had a lot of time with him. He definitely instilled in her the desire to make people smile.
She went to the crockpot and reached above it to get plates out.
She remembered that she hadn’t run the dishwasher the day before because she had been thinking she would put the supperdishes in, and then she’d been too exhausted after grading papers all evening to come back to the kitchen and finish her work.
“Are you okay, honey?” Grandma said from behind her.
Nelly took a breath, straightening her shoulders. She probably shouldn’t have taken on yet another responsibility, but jumping in as a Secret Saint had been too irresistible for her to pass up. She was in a unique position, because of her classroom, and the children were at an age where they still told everything without realizing that some things maybe were a little bit more personal. So she knew lots of people who could use help over the holidays, and she couldn’t resist.
Plus, her house was paid for, since she lived with her grandma, and she had plenty of money for herself, so why not spread smiles around? Just like her grandpa.
But it did leave her tired—teaching all day and taking care of her grandma in the evening.
They did have a home health aide who came and spent a few hours with her grandma every day, but perhaps it was time to do a bit more than that since her grandma’s episodes of confusion were getting more and more common.
The one today had scared her just a bit.
“Are you ready to eat?” she asked Grandma as she put the dishes in the sink and began to wash them.
“I’m hungry. I didn’t think you’d ever get home,” Grandma said, sounding like her old self. “I should have washed those for you. I didn’t even notice they were in there.”
Normally, her grandma would have noticed, but that was just one more thing that was changing.
Nelly’s heart ached a bit at the idea that her grandma wasn’t ever going to be the same. It was hard to think about.
But she was determined to keep her home as long as possible, because that’s what Grandma had said she wanted, and even now when she was in her right mind, it was what she would say. But the responsibility was almost overwhelming.
Later that night, after her grandmother had gone to bed and shehad finished grading her papers and made sure that she had gotten all the dishes in the dishwasher and had it started so she wouldn’t have to wash dishes before they could eat tomorrow, Nelly pulled out the necessary items that she had purchased the last weekend when she had gone to the big box store and started organizing them into food baskets. She imagined the families’ reactions and wished that she could have been there when the Harneys had seen their fresh baked bread. She had deliberately taken her early morning walk by their house, just so she could see them opening their door and the smiles on their faces, but the bread had been gone. Obviously, she hadn’t gotten up early enough, or she made too much noise when she dropped it off on their porch and woke them up the night before.
She didn’t think she had. She had taken a lot of care to be quiet, but…maybe she’d been louder than what she thought. After all, she’d been a little preoccupied, thinking about making people smile and doing good deeds, just like the Bible said. To not let your right hand know what your left hand was doing, but to do your good deeds without thought of reward for yourself, knowing that God would reward you.
She wasn’t even necessarily doing it for the rewards, although she knew God saw everything. She was doing it just because it made her feel good. Because she knew that it made God smile to see His children being kind and doing good to others.
She finished packaging the food baskets and grabbed the cloak that she used particularly for these deliveries. It was a cloak that used to belong to her grandmother, where the hood came well over her hair and completely hid her face from view. The cloak flowed down to her knees and hid her figure as well. She could hide a lot of things in the folds of the cloak, and she loved it, since it was also warm and comfortable as well.
She walked outside, carrying all four baskets under her cloak and humming softly to herself.
It wasn’t super late, but she knew it was late enough that mostpeople would be inside. Especially considering that it was so cold out.
She saw some other people coming down the sidewalk and ducked into a woodshed before they saw her. While she wasn’t afraid of being recognized, she did try to avoid people as much as she could.
She stood in the darkness as they came closer.
“I wanted to take a walk outside tonight, because I heard the Harney family had an unexpected surprise this week.”
She smiled to herself as the people got closer and she could hear them talking about the gift that she had given.
“I heard that too! Eight bags of groceries! Oh my goodness, that must have been four hundred dollars. Who has that kind of money to just give to someone else?”
Wait. Eight bags of groceries? That wasn’t what she gave them. It was two loaves of bread.
Immediately she thought about the miracle in the scriptures where Jesus had turned two fishes and five loaves of bread into enough food to feed five thousand people. Surely he hadn’t changed her two loaves of bread into eight bags of groceries?
She was trying to reconcile the idea of that in her brain, and come up with a scientific explanation for it, when the person said, “I just thought maybe we’d run into someone doing something suspicious. After all, I know the Harneys would really like to thank them, and I have a few people I know who could use some help.” They went on to mention a few people, some that Nelly knew from her classroom and some that she made a mental note to research.
“I think they got something else too besides the groceries. Was it bread or something?” the other person said.
