Melissa’s Cozy Teacup

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You see them in antique shops and thrift stores, photographs no one wants, or can’t remember, who is inside the frame, captured in a moment in time. A school teacher, alone on the prairie who scraped together enough from her meager salary to afford a picture of herself to be taken by the traveling photographer, to be given to the children she has taught. She is being transferred to another school and will most likely never pass this way again. All the lives she has encountered and friendships she has made will be left behind as she climbs into the stage coach to travel further west. A small reticule in hand and a trunk on the roof of the carriage, is all she has in the world. She chose a life of independence which usually lead to solitude for unmarried women in those days. Her companions? -the few other single women about the community and the occasional older female student interested in a life of teaching as a way to either escape a life of marriage to an unwanted choice made by her parents, or because of a scarcity of eligible men in her town. Some, headed west because of the promise of adventure, wealth and opportunity unavailable in the east. You see, under the stays, lace and parasols of some, beat the heart of an adventurer. The heart of a wild rose longing to bloom in places unknown. Now, her picture languishes on the dusty shelves of antique stores, her story untold. There may be a journal somewhere, who else was there to hear her tale? Where ever it is, it is not with the picture, so the face and the words remain unpaired. The journal stirring up the imagination of the reader trying to picture the type of woman to embark on such an adventure, and the picture is being gazed upon by someone working up their imagination, creating a story to go with the face.