Day 1103: 5 Minute Freewrite: Wednesday - Prompt: button holes

jars185898_1920.jpg

In southern Virginia the week of January 5, the biggest problem a small-town police officer had was getting everyone ready for truly adverse weather that had been predicted to overtake the area by January 7.

Tinyville in particular was fortunate in such cases to be in the rain shadow of the Blue Ridge; the worst of winter's violence spent itself getting up and over.

However, Ironwood Hamilton, captain of the three-man force in Tinyville, took absolutely no comfort in this.

His cousin and best friend, Captain H.F. Lee of the Blue Ridge precinct of Big Loft's police force, was up in the teeth of that weather on the foothills of the Blue Ridge, fighting for his life and that of thousands of other people in a situation that by Thursday the 9th had already claimed the lives of nearly 400 people with more than a thousand injured.

Captain Hamilton prayed hourly, and sometimes even by the minute, about all that.

It was going to get far worse there before it got better.

Yet there was also another issue brewing that was costing lives … the men in his former Army Reserve cohort whom he had been pleading to avail themselves of the services at VA Hospital in Roanoke and at the Veteran's Lodge had found that time had run out on them.

They had decided to come together to celebrate through New Year in a orgy of what men traumatized by their experiences and not healed will do with a common bond of service and trauma, and then to go home to their wives and families.

But there had been no direction home for them. Their wives and children had gone, taking all available monies, and changing locks on homes.

Some of them had begun publicly acting out; there had been a dangerous incident at Lofton National Bank.

And then had come the weather on Tuesday and Wednesday – and these men were essentially homeless.

Yet every button has a button hole: this was the wisdom of Captain Hamilton's Hamilton grandmother, Dorcas. The mellow, peaceful spirit of Grandma Dorcas had connected deeply with the mellow spirit of her eldest grandson, Woody, and he had learned a lot from the master seamstress who clothed many of the poor in Lofton County free of charge.

“You see these buttons in this jar, Woody – they are like life's problems, and it seems that there is no end to them and how different they are,” she had said to him. “But God is the Master Tailor of all things, and in His plan, there are button holes for every button. There is a solution to every problem, and He has created it long before we ever know there is a problem. Don't be dismayed by the problems, Woody. Just ask God where the button holes are to the buttons, and let Him lead you.”

17 desperate veterans out in the winter weather constituted a rather dangerous jar of buttons, if one took one's problems that way.

So: given Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to work after work, Captain Hamilton was out every day, sleuthing for button holes in his persona as Major Hamilton … .

Image by Shannon Smith from Pixabay

H2
H3
H4
3 columns
2 columns
1 column
Join the conversation now
Ecency