Kindness and plum stones

 

During Lent, I've decided to post as often as I can about kindness. (See my post of yesterday, Ash Wednesday 2021.)

So today I'm starting with an early memory of how someone was kind to me. It involved plums and plum stones.

I was about 4 years old and attending a kindergarten school. Usually I went home for lunch. The day of my plum stone memory was, I believe, the first day that I had lunch at school. It was a hot meal cooked in the school kitchen. The dessert that day was stewed plums. I ate one. It tasted good, but it contained the plum seed, hard as stone. What was I supposed to do with the plum stone?

At home I'd been taught to spit the plum stone into my spoon and place the stone on the rim of the pudding bowl. My immediate problem on that 1st day of staying for school lunch was that the school bowls had no rims. My longer term problem was that I was then a rather shy little girl. I didn't dare ask what I should do with the stone. I knew I shouldn't put it on the table or drop it on the floor. Reader, I ate the plum but kept the stone in my mouth. I did the same with the next plum and the next and so it went on until my cheeks bulged like a hamster's.

Thankfully, an older child noticed what I was doing. She quietly explained to me that I could just put the stones back in the bowl. As far as I remember, she did this without attracting the attention of other children, who would probably have laughed at me. It was a triple kindness, noticing my problem, helping me to solve it and not causing me humiliation in the process. I remember the sense of relief I felt as one by one I returned the plum stones to my bowl. I would like to think I thanked her, but I probably didn't. Today I thank God for that child and her kindness to me. She taught me a lot about kindness that day and I have never forgotten it.

Image Credit: Photo by Evan-Amos on Wikimedia Commons