Purple flowers

Today I am grateful for the relationships we build with our community. Our neighbors, teachers, friends, and colleagues. Without them, I would feel like a lost puzzle piece. With them, I feel like a cog in a well-oiled machine, I feel warmth and security and camaraderie. With them, I also celebrate their gains and sympathize their losses.

This morning, I learned that one the daycare workers where my baby attends had lost her own daughter to cancer. At only 26, she was taken from her mother Maria, her neighbors, her teachers, her friends and colleagues. I had wondered why Maria had been out all week. I didn't know the young woman that died, but I know that her mother greets me everyday when I drop off my own baby at daycare. Her mother will talk to me in Spanish so I can practice, and she doesn't know it, but when I take my baby home and I speak Spanish to her, she is calm and cool and understands.

I often speak to my students about the effects they have on one another as ripples in a pond. The interactions others see and hear from you will, in turn, affect how they act and react to others. Maria has been nothing but gracious in the way she looks after my baby and the others; it has given me a peace of mind while I go to work so I can further support my family. I just hope that she can get the time she needs to mourn and heal.

A mother and daughter are separate, beautiful flowers that share the same roots.