Weekend Freewrite -1/25/2020 - Single Prompt Option: Runny

Mrs. Maggie Thornton scooped up oatmeal to child after beautiful child with great contentment, and looked around to her fellow servers and saw the same look of peace and contentment on their faces …

A couple of veterans from the Veteran's Lodge, for 153 years the home of veterans who could not return to public life … men who without the structure of military life could no longer function in any safe sense … same look of peace and joy …

All colors, shapes, and sizes … and even Mrs. Thorpe in her wheelchair, doing a shorter kettle for the really little children, and singing to them as their little fingers of every color touched her blue-black skin in wonderment as she ladeled their oatmeal, and then touched the equally dark hands of Mr. Thorpe when he came by with a new kettle …

There was lots of singing, and laughing, and eating … some people were getting their oatmeal to go, and others were sprawling all over the Hamilton front and back yard …

And, in the first time she had known him, Henry Fitzhugh Lee also was in perfect peace, in his role of keeping the oatmeal going … the endless sacks of oats, the gallons of milk and molasses, the tins of cinnamon, this idol of Virginia again in human form, Lee in his prime in an apron and a big oar for stirring, nothing more pressing – though all important – than to make sure perfect oatmeal, not too thick, not too runny, made it out to the people who never would know he was there.

“So, tell me again why you are going to start this big new business venture your brother-in-law wants you to start, when this kind of thing is really what makes you happy, Henry?” Mrs. Thornton said to Captain Lee when all was done and he rested while the cleanup took place.

He looked so dreamy and peaceful … but that was still H.F. Lee, even in that moment of contented exhaustion.

“It is impossible that I should be without work of such substance and challenge if I am to settle into full civilian life,” he said. “Happiness will not cut it, Maggie … yet at the same time, I am not opposed to any happiness you feel free to join me in sharing, as I will be sure to invite you.”