The night burned on with the smoke of the everlasting scent of devastation, and I had only been up for a few hours. Those hours were painstaking.

I awoke to the news that my house was on fire. Luckily we had all stayed the night with my oldest sister because of the electricity outage from the ice storm. The furiously paced ride to my house was gut twisting and heart wrenching. “Could my house really be on fire? Could my family lose everything we had worked for? What am I supposed to do?” These questions were just a few of the vibrating ones I had.

We topped the hill and we saw a fiery glow at the bottom and sure enough it was my family’s house. In the world today, I never see much kindness anymore but that night the air was filled with love, compassion, and hope. The firefighters were working hard putting out the blaze, but the fire was too strong and it took down the whole house. The structure in which I was raised, educated, and lived – my most precious memories had been wiped out in a matter of a few hours.

Someone once said, “Kindness is LOVE with its work boots on”. I never gave thanks to the firefighters for risking their lives to save my house; I just sort of took it for granted. The thing that took me by surprise was my classmates. I stayed home, my sister’s home, from school that next morning, but apparently so did my fellow students. My entire family was in the living room thinking of different approaches on our financial circumstance when we heard the doorbell ring. We answered it just like every other knock at the door and there, standing in that lonely doorway, was a single boy. In his hands he held a glass baseball that gleamed full of hope. He was one of my best friends and his mother walked up behind him crying. The boy said, “I don’t have much but I want you to have it”. I looked at him puzzled and he looked at the baseball in his hands, opened it up and gave me all of the money inside. It was his money bank that he had been saving up to buy himself a new baseball bat. Yet, he gave the money to me. Why? Why would a boy, even though he was my best friend, give me money that he had worked for?

 I didn’t understand it but I found out when I got older that kindness shouldn’t have an ulterior motive. Most of my classmates came that day at different times and gave me something that meant the most to them, whether it was their favorite jacket, playing cards, game, or even a trinket. They weren’t forced to give me something they loved, but they wanted to. They wanted to show that they cared.

Today, I still have a majority of the things I received from all of my friends that week. I go through them occasionally and remember how lucky I am that I have people around me who are unselfishly able to show a random act of kindness – a kindness that can’t be seen with the naked eye, but can be felt in the warmest of hearts. And it was that warm feeling that gave my family hope.

Dalton
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