Today’s Mission: Select 20 of my 40 sentences and expand them each into a paragraph. I’ll do a few a day. I finished three today (Sentence 1,2 and 21).

1. I stopped believing in things I can’t see and science can’t prove, but I’ve held on to St. Anthony, and for whatever reason, he’s stood by me. He’s the patron saint of lost things, and I started praying to him for help finding trivial things, like guitar picks, lunch money, and missing homework. I was fifteen when I lost my Dad’s car keys, after I let my best friend, Sheila Trinkel, talk me into driving us all to Shady’s Drive-in in our big red station wagon, even though she only had a permit. We had the best time in my short life that evening, and I made it back home, car safe in the garage a half hour before my Dad was due to return from his weekly trip to New York. When I reached into the pocket of my coat, though, the keys weren’t there. After ten minutes of frantic searching, I slumped on the floor next to my bed, and sobbed out a prayer, “Dear St. Anthony, please come around…” I found the keys poking out from under my bedroom rug. [Redemption]

2. The whole drama started in sixth grade, which is normal as far as drama goes, but it took forty two years to finish the story. Sixth grade started off hopeful, a new school, a fresh start. I imagined great things for that year, and buzzed on hope, I wrote my first play. I had written a few short stories, but completing the play was different. The actual play wasn’t unique; it was a rip off of Little Women, set on a planet that resembled the small Pennsylvania town where I lived. The novelty was accomplishing something important to me, something I’d struggled to complete. [Performance]

3. I climbed to the top of the PPL building to face my fears, but it didn’t go the way I planned.

4. The day before I turned 13, Charles chopped off his pinky.

5.I’m a little like a sphynx, the friendly, smart hairless cat, not the mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion.

6. The day I died the flowers on the mophead hydrangea in our backyard finally returned.

7. I used to think there were two kinds of people in the world, the sunsets and the sunrises, but Prooba showed me the world’s more complicated than that.

8. It would have been the perfect summer if Peter hadn’t stepped on that spike in the middle of smurf olympics.

9. Jambalaya is supposed to be a supper, but Mama thrust that name on my big brother, which I swear was the start of all my troubles.

10.Standing on my son’s porch on my 75th birthday, hiding from Tula and the grandkids, a thought tickled behind my left ear.

11.The sunlight gave no warmth, though it shone as bright as ever.

12.Birds didn’t sing, or chirp or tweet in Clovis, but they made a sound, and when you heard it, you either lifted your face to the Stars while your heart filled with love, or you covered your ears and cried.

13.Mother’s Day came like it always did, but this time April didn’t have lunch at the Bethlehem hotel. 

14. Mourning doves mate for life.

15. On my first day of second grade everyone in Ms. Link’s class had to say what animal they were most like and I, a fidgety child with a habit of storing treasures in my pockets, went with kangaroo.

16. Basements have a bad reputation, but Jasper’s basement saved everyone in Mrs. Peele’s third period class.

17. I’d never admit this to Sherbet, but in my Dad’s shed, I’m engineering a tiny elephant.

18. Last Christmas I nearly drowned in a puddle in Merchants Square.

19. Rain against the roof used to help me fall asleep, until the night Pete escaped.

20. My ears perked at the sound of the text message jingle.

21. When Isla was a girl monsters filled her dreams, and though those nightmares faded as she grew, deep down she was certain something giant and fierce would end her. She didn’t understand the danger of small things. She married Troy because he was a good man, and love grew green between them at first, but they let a word cut here, and a misunderstanding bite there, until both Isla and Troy were nothing but scars. [Love]