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Meeting Leah,

I was on my way to work this morning, after having stopped at Starbucks with my nice Venti Soy Vanilla Latte when she caught my eye. A young girl (18 or so) slumped against the Nordstrom building, shivering from the cold wet morning, I loaned her a shy smile as I walked by her with my venti coffee, new coat and warm scarf. I always feel kind of ridiculous when I see someone shivering and I’m carrying a HUGE cup of coffee that cost me $5. 
She was crying, and not in a way that was over dramatic or attention grabbing, but in the way that makes you wonder what’s wrong. I stopped and asked if she was okay. She said that she had run away from home and she was cold, hungry and scared. She said she was mostly scared of going back home even though she was cold and hungry. I asked why she was scared to go home thinking maybe she had an abusive home, or even a home that had kicked her out. But she said because she was pretty sure her Mom would be angry with her and she wasn’t looking forward to ‘facing’ her. I assured her that she can always go home, and that if she walked in the door her Mom would probably be so happy that she was safe at home that she would forget most of her anger. I may have quoted Dorothy Gale in the situation stating “there’s no place like home”. I gave her my cup of coffee, my lunch, and a free bus ticket to get on a bus headed back home.
Now its lunch, I am hungry, but I hope to never experience the type of hunger someone like Leah faces. I will always love my Mom deeply for when I would threaten to run away from home, she would try a little reverse psychology on me and help me pack my bags – always remembering a granola bar or two (in case I got hungry), generally I would stop in my tracks and say “what? You want me to leave?” and then start to BEG her not to make me leave. She was a sneaky devil like that!
I ever did get up the nerve to walk out the door luggage in hand after her first attempts to thwart me she would then offer to help me set up my tent in the back yard (just out of the view of the house) and then leave me there for however long it took me to cool off. I would sit (in my tent) and STEAM about Mom helping me pack; I mean the nerve of that woman! I would then (inevitably) end up back on the front porch steps with my luggage, crying thinking my Mom doesn’t love me at all so she helped me pack and wanted me to leave, so darn it I was going to STAY at all costs - I’d show her! Mom would come out, beverage in hand and tell me how scared she was that I wasn’t coming home, and how happy she was to see me, and how worried she was [wink wink]!
I wish I could pick up the phone and tell her thank you. Thank you for being the type of Mom who cared enough to fight with me when I was being unreasonable, and for being the type of Mom who knew me so much better than I knew myself.
I walked away from Leah a little light in the lunch pail today, but with a heart full of hope. Hope that she will go back home, to her Mom to mend things, because a relationship with your Mom is a terrible thing to waste.

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