Daisy's Story

The Bide-A-While Home

High on a green hill, overlooking the wide, sparkling river, stood a grand mansion right there in the center of the countryside. It was surrounded by huge, leafy trees of all kinds, and garden paths that curved gently round about through the flowers and ivy.

Twenty-two children lived in the great mansion, and Daisy Stranger was one of them. The fine old house was an orphanage, a stopping place for children with nowhere else to go. It was called "The Bide-a-While Home and School for Children." The children lived here until someone wonderful and responsible and filled with love took a child to be their very own.

Every third Saturday of the month, folks would come to visit the youngsters, and to look at the Records Book. At the end of the third Saturday of the month, there was sure to be one less orphan at the Bide-a-While, and one more happy family just starting out.

Daisy lived in great expectation of the day when she would stop being an orphan. Her first awareness of "Company Saturday" was when she was four years old and her best friend, Minnie Blank, had found a mother and dad.

Then Helen, Jimmy, Anna, Melissa, Walter, and John all went off happily, waving goodbye along with the years. More summers passed, and Daisy was seven. She began to wonder if she would ever get a family of her own.

Daisy was a cheerful child; you might even say a merry child. She had a wonderful time at the School. Every season brought a new activity of drawing or writing or gathering to fill the year's portfolio each child created to mark academic progress. Daisy had seven portfolios which she could review at any time in the files so carefully kept in the school library. Her first portfolio had a print of her own tiny infant hand which had been dipped in brown water color and then pressed onto paper. The "Babies' Teacher" had added a few lines here and there to create a turkey for Thanksgiving. The portfolio also held short reports telling how well she progressed with eating, and illnesses, and creeping, and teething and other activities including naps. (All the infants slept in boxes on a carpeted floor. This was so that when they learned to climb out, they would have only a short distance to fall. Later, she slept in a three-sided floor box so she could go in and out when she liked. When she was a bit older, she was given a trundle bed of her own.)

The portfolios were also viewed by the school's Trustees, Representatives of Governing Agencies, and visiting nurses and doctors. And best of all they were there for parents who might look them over for signs that this was just the child they wanted.

Daisy was proud of her portfolios.

The Trustees, those who smiled easily, and those whose faces were etched with earnest concern, were godly men and women who believed that Jesus their Savior loved children and wanted them to be joyful. Because of their belief, there were arrangements at the school for picnics, garden parties, plays, singing, story-telling, and memory work with lots and lots of Bible readings and prayers.

Along with arithmetic and science projects, there was laundry, cleaning, and sewing. The children learned to set tables with real china dishes. They helped each other clean up spills. And they knew that there was "a place for everything and every thing had its place". And there was Migsie, the "Primaries" matron whose fun-loving laughter chased away heartaches and loneliness as quickly as she chased dust and dirt from the children's room.

Truly, Daisy had no complaints about the Bide-a­While. It was just that she did want to have a mother and father of her own. She had never stopped praying for a mother and a father even though, she thought, that was simply too lavish. Two grown-ups loving just one little you.

For a while she prayed that Migsie would become her mom, but she soon realized that this was very selfish. What would the other orphans do without Migsie? Besides, who would be the dad? So she simply decided to keep on praying for a mother who came with a dad; a mother with a dad that would be her very own.

In the year that Daisy turned eight, she was given her own bedside stand with a mirror. One day, as she was combing her hair while looking at herself, she suddenly thought,

"It's my nose! That's why I can't find a mother and dad. No one wants a child with a nose like mine. It's so...it's sort of... it sits on my face like a baked potato! Oh, dear, that's the reason. It's my nose!"

A few days later, when she was cleaning her new bedside stand, carefully dusting around the carved wooden leaves and vines of that small wooden bit of furniture that had lain forgotten for years in a benefactor's attic, Daisy happened to glance again into the cloudy mirror. She had been examining her nose all week, in the bottoms of polished pots, in windows as she passed, and in the upside-down curve of her spoon. She kept looking at her nose, wondering what she could do about that big vegetable sitting on the middle of her face.

But now, looking in the mirror once again, she exclaimed,

"Oh! It's not just my nose at all! It's my hair! Yes, it's my hair. It doesn't shine. It doesn't bounce. It has no special color at all. It just sits there all over my head! That's why no one wants me for their child. It's my hair!"

She ran off to look for Migsie, and asked her advice about making better hair. Migsie gave her some rags, and showed Daisy how to roll her hair in strips, and tie the end into a knot. Daisy made sure she understood exactly what to do, then ran back to her bedstand with Migsie's rags and did up her hair.

It was very difficult to sleep on, but she knew the effort would be worth it.

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