The Velcro Bow              Sugar and spice and everything nice. It wasn’t until the birth of our daughter that I realized what little girls are made of. Fluff, lace, ribbon and curls all remind me of a precious little girl with a special little hair bow.            “About knee-high to a grasshopper” would describe that little girl the first time she walked into my life.  I worked for a law firm, and her parents were clients of ours.  The little girl had been terribly burned and disfigured in an accidental fire at her grandmother’s house a few years before.  With legalities regarding insurance coverage to pay for the medical bills, her parents needed an attorney.            The little girl walked slowly over to my desk. She wore a hooded face cap or her head, similar to that of a ski mask, to shield her fragile body from germs. Her big blue eyes looked at me.  With her lips gone and her mouth horribly twisted, she managed a smile.            On my desk were pictures of my son in his baseball uniform and my daughter in her birthday dress.  As the little girl pointed to the pictures, her hands covered in protective gloves, she asked, “Who are they?”            I told her their names, “Hriston and Karissa.”            She turned to look for her mother and father sitting in the conference room, and I secretly prayed she’d return to them. Instead, she turned around to me again and said of my daughter’s picture, “She’s pretty.  She has long, long hair. I really like her hair bow.”            And that was that.  Papers signed, notarized and copied, and out the front door she went.            One Saturday, several months later, as I held one of my daughter’s hair bows in the palm of my hand, I wondered what that little girl would do with a hair bow.  She didn’t even have any hair.  She’d never be able to wear such a bow.            Just as I spoke the word never, I felt such a grieving within my soul.  It was as though I had spoken a word of profanity.            I’d always heard in Sunday School class and church that we should take the word never out of our vocabulary. We were told, “Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.”  And I had said the word never.  Lord, forgive me!            Hadn’t I been told after the complicated birth of our son that I could never have another child?  For eight years, surgery and medications had failed. Wasn’t it nine months from the very day my mother went home to be with Jesus that the good Lord gave us a baby daughter?            Hadn’t I been diagnosed with glaucoma and told I would be blind within three years?  Neither laser surgery nor medications had helped, and I would never get better.  Wasn’t it this same loving and able God who heard all the prayers and stretched down His healing hands? I not only regained the lost eyesight but was completely healed. How could I doubt my Lord?            That week I found the little girl’s folder in my desk. There in the middle section of the file was an envelope marked “Evidence Photographs/Do Not Bend.”  I slowly opened the envelope and pulled out a 5 x 7 picture taken at Sears of a little girl with big blue eyes and brown banana curls. She was beautiful.            That evening I made the little girl a hair bow. Lots of lace, white beads, pearl strands, a little peach butterfly, a couple of tiny flowers all hot glued together with long ribbons hanging down. So what if she wore a mask?  I prayed the bow could be secured with Velcro. All, done, I put the bow in a sandwich bag, took it to work and placed it in my bottom desk drawer.            A year after her first visit, the little girl came into the law office again.  Her flesh still covered to guard against infection, she waved a gloved hand and I waved back.  I tried to imagine what she must have gone through the past year. The pain.  The stares.            I had added new pictures on my desk and she noticed. I told her that one picture was of Hriston, and the other was of Karissa in the Easter dress in front of the Church.            Those big blue eyes.  The same blue eyes I hd seen in that lovely photograph from Sears.            She said, “My Papaw says that I am goin’ to go to heaven, ‘cause I already been burned up down here.”            She smiled and I cried.  As I cleared my throat, I told the little girl I had something in my desk just for her.  I pulled out the bag containing the Velcro bow.            “It’s so pretty!  Put it on me!”  she pleaded.            Her mother nodded and I placed the bow on her scalp hood. The Velcro held.  No skin nor hair, but this little girl was wearing a fancy hair bow just like my daughter’s.  I gave her a small mirror from my purse.            “I feel pretty inside, like before,” she said. “Remember Mamma?”            And to me she whispered, “Thank you.”            Hugs, tears and smiles.  Blessings never to be forgotten.  And then, just as suddenly as she had come into my life, she was gone again. She and the Velcro bow.   by Jeanie Killian – Department of Anatomy