Susan-Ashton

Mom and Dad brought me home to Maple Street in a shining- with-hope postwar world. The house was my parents’ first purchase: $3,000 on a veteran’s loan. Daddy built a white picket fence all around it. He had survived D-day and the push into France. Neither crass materialism nor rock ‘n’ roll had yet appeared on the American scene. But the world was a scary place for a pudgy little girl with friy hair and a sensitive soul.
A paw print in the floor of our garage both fascinated and frightened me. Daddy teased that a black bear had ventured by and left his print when the cement was wet. In my three-year-old mind,the bear was still in the neighborhood prowling about and looking for me. Playing in our backyard was not innocent. I hung out close to the back porch or around my mothers ankles in the flower garden, an eye toward the parameters of the picket fence.
Is there a less-than-idyllic situation in your life? What can you do to confront it? What symbol would you use to speak as a testament to your courage? I never did meet the bear on Maple Street, but I’ve faced many bears” since I’ve grown up, and I found them less fearsome than I believed.
Imagined danger or not, life doesn’t always feel safe—even in the most idyllic of places and times. No escape from misfortune is guaranteed. I’ve found, half a century later that the best way to cope with that fact is to live life fully anyway. I keep an eye out for danger not in order to avoid it, but to courageously confront it

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