Morning Dew

The Two Wonders of the World

     My sister Vera and I have lived in an orphanage, ever since we were first born. Our mother stumbled in on a late night on January, frozen and sick. Crying, begging for the nurses to take the children in her arms, wrapped in threadbare sheets the color of the sky when it snows. A deep purplish blue color, the royal color kings and queens wear. They took us. 

     She died within the hour.

    The orphanage is an awful place, plainly described. It's freezing there, almost as cold as it is outside in the winter. We go to bed famished most nights, and when we huddle together, we can hear our stomachs growling in hunger. The counselors are mean, they scream at the little ones when they don't wash the floors right. The roofs leak and the floors are freezing. You can always hear crying here, no matter which hallway you go down. 

    We managed to escape. When we turned 8, we sneaked out. The guards left the door open by mistake and we ran down the hall, out the open door and into the spring rain drizzling outside. 

   We walked free. For the first time in our lives, we saw the sun set, the flowers bloom. We discovered the soft, green grass, the color of the apples we sometimes steal from the orchard near the farm. We saw beautiful things. But the most beautiful was love and a hope, the kind we've never known of. 

   We walked for miles, hungry and scared.  After days of walking, we stumbled across a farmhouse, far from where we lived our lives. We were broken. Hopeless. Lonely. We had nothing to lose. We entered the house and called out for the residents. An old man, around the age of 70 comes to greet us. His shoulders bent forward, carrying the weight of the world and his eyes held a sadness that was painful to see.

   We told him our story. He believes the malnourished children, with dark circle under their eyes. The children dressed in ripped, gray clothes. The children whose eyes betrayed the pain they felt. Instead of kicking us out of his house, he invited us in. Wrapped us in blankets and poured us tea. He shared his sad story with the two orphans with a story of their own.

   Chuck told us about his wife. The way her honey swept hair blew in the wind, the way her eyes sparkled like thousands of miniature diamonds, and most of all, the happiness she bought him and the way she made him smile. That's when we discovered love.

   Since then, we'll seen love all over the place. We see it when Chuck looks at old picture of his wife who was taken by the wind, scattered over oceans and valleys. We see it when he hugs one of us, or bandages a skimmed knee Vera got from riding an old bike she found in the farm shed. We found that love comes in different forms. Chuck loves us as the children he never had. Since that day that we can stumble into the farmhouse, he grew attached to us, and cherished us. Love is a beautiful thing. Love creates hope. Hope is new to us as well. We see it in Chuck's eyes now, instead of the pain we saw before.

    Hope is the chance that something will change, someone will come along, that a pebble will drop in the water and cause something new and beautiful. Chuck has hope now. He hopes and believes. Hope is contagious. Vera and I, we hope too. We hope we've found something permanent. We hope life will be different now. We hope it'll be new and beautiful. And it is.

    We found that despite all the pain and sadness, there is always hope and love to overpower it. We found hope and love in Chuck, and Chuck found hope and love within the two lonely, scared children that he found on his doorstep one day. And that just goes to show that perhaps, there are more then just seven wonders in this world.

Vera and Thomas Cattermole were indeed royal, as betrayed by their dark purple sheets. Their mother was a dis-owned princess who had run away from the castle after being abandoned by her husband. Vera and Thomas never found out about their true parentage, but they found such love and hope with an old farmer by the name of Chuck, that they needn't found this out at all.

First chapter done! I dedicated this one to a friend of mine who developed this idea into a story and helped me put it into words when I got stuck. Thanks so much! Check out her stories. She's an amazing writer! @MyLifeInBlackWhite

Suggestions and feedback are appreciated as ALWAYS :') (If you get the reference)