Every weekday morning, a small group of children bustles out of the building across the street with two or three adults ushering them safely to the bus stop. The kids hop and skip indirectly down the sidewalk, while their chaperones sweep and scull the air in a cooperative effort to move them forward. The daily concerns of these strangers are probably very different from mine. But when I’ve gone to bed infuriated by the evening news, these children renew my hope by reliably bursting out the door the next morning with coats reluctantly zipped, unmistakably excited for the new day.
Julie Holston is a writer and editor living in Minnesota with her wife and orange tabby cat. Her writing can be found in the Brevity Blog and is forthcoming in flash glass by Glassworks magazine.