Endless Summer Creations

”You can’t just invite yourself over,” came the words over the phone. “It’s not 1980 – you’re not five years old anymore.” It didn’t even seem real.  This couldn’t be happening.  Granpop wouldn’t let this happen.  It wasn’t that Carla was so shocked to hear those words coming from Stan.  He had always been strange.  Carla had just come to take it as a fact of life that he was a bit off.  Most of the time he just sat there with the gravest of tones and expressions, and skulked in and out of rooms with a strange frailty which contradicted his fine-tuned physical condition.  He was a superb runner and had actually fueled Carla’s inspiration to start running herself when she was only 12. Stan had other good points too – he could tell maniacally funny jokes.  Jokes that would have everyone around the table roaring with laughter.  But these jokes were in stark contrast to Stan’s usual grim demeanor.  It was a startling sense of hu...

Of all the times Angel had ever been hurt in her life, this was the hardest.  She had never known a loss to compare to this.  What would Granny say?  She’d been gone now going on eleven years.  Angel still had a place in the family as Granny left it.  Angel was on her way to see Granny in her last days but was two days too late.  Angel was to be there on Mother’s Day Sunday.  Granny died that Friday. Angel had walked into a house filled with a strange stillness.  The flowers she had ordered for Granny were sitting there on the coffee table.  Why was everyone trying to act normal in front of her?  “You can cry, Angel,” her mother had said. Pricilla had been there at Granny’s deathbed and laid her in her favorite dress.  And now Pricilla was saying to Angel, “I asked Granny to give us a sign if she was with us, to be in the wind.  And Angel, the wind has not stopped blowing!” Angel looked at the branches covered in new M...