wishes ...

   As the years passed, so did her family.  When her grandparents became too old to live alone, Elsa moved in with them.  Caring for them until they both died within days of each other.  Their house was left to her, and the nook remained her favorite place to sit and think of what her life could have been with Clarence.

  When her mother became too ill for her father to care for her, she moved in with Elsa where she stayed until she died.  

  Her father, however, was stubborn and refused to leave the home he had been born in.  Elsa checked on him daily and prepared his meals until one day she found he had died in his sleep, a photo of her mother cradled in his arms.

  As she prepared his house for sale after the funeral, she found a box high on a shelf filled with all of the letters they had intercepted from Clarence.  Later that evening, sitting in the nook where she had always dreamed of what might have been, she read each of his letters over and over again.  When she finally looked up through tear-filled eyes, her face puffy from crying all night, the sun was coming up over the village.  She showered, changed her clothes, and went to the cemetery where her parents and grandparents now lay side by side.

  She grieved the life she could have had, and the loss of all the people she had loved, but no longer had enough tears to cry for.  Sitting there in the grass between her mother and grandparents, she wondered if ever she would be happy again.  A butterfly fluttered over to her from a nearby flower and settled on her hand.  Elsa watched, mesmerized.  It slowly walked up her arm, stopping every so often to unfurl its tongue to taste the sweat on her skin in the warm sunshine of fall.  It stopped at the edge of her dress sleeve and the two of them looked at each other closely.

  Was this a message from her grandmother?  She had always reminded Elsa that when the caterpillar believed the world had ended, it emerged as a beautiful butterfly and that it was the struggle to break free of the chrysalis that gave it the strength to fly.

  Elsa made a wish as the butterfly slowly flapped its wings and flew off.