Just when the cold, grey skies of late December have settled in, just when the joy of the holidays have passed, just when it seems all bleak and midwinter . . . a simple story of hope.
Go back to September 6, 1986. Say you were a teenager then . . .
Christopher Astle and Emily Yanich were teenage pals strolling back from a 7-Eleven that afternoon in late summer -- two ordinary kids on an ordinary Wednesday after school -- when they found the abandoned baby.
Source ~ Washington Post
These two teenagers found a baby wrapped in towels at the front door of a townhouse in Fairfax, Virginia.
This is where the miracle started.
Emily Yanich and Chris Astle were both 15 in 1989. They acknowledge that on the afternoon in question, they "may" have walked to the 7-Eleven to buy cigarettes. When they returned to their neighborhood, they heard a baby crying. "I looked around and noticed that there weren't any moms out there pushing their kids around in a stroller," Astle recalled. The two teens followed the cries and found a bundle on the landing of a townhouse "where it didn't seem anyone was at home." They found the dark-eyed baby girl wrapped in orange towels, her umbilical cord still attached.
Source ~ The Southern
Seventeen years ago, during a 4th of July roadtrip with a great friend, I ended up delivering the baby of a stranger at a gas station in Tampa, Florida. I have never forgotten this event, nor the healthy infant who slid, miraculously, from his mother's body on that hot night. She told me she would name him Jason. He must now be ready for adulthood -- college, war . . . I do not know. But he is always in my heart. As he was in the heart of my friend.
I have never forgotten you, Jason.
Back to Mia:
"I walked over and carefully unfolded the towels, and here's a naked newborn baby girl, just crying," (Chris Astle) said. "She still had part of her umbilical cord attached. . . . She had a full head of hair. I picked her up and held her. She kept on crying. . . . I was completely freaked out."
(snip)
"The next thing we know, the paramedics took the baby, and she was gone," Chris said.
(snip)
It turned out that the baby was less than 12 hours old, officials said later. She weighed 6 pounds, 10 1/2 ounces and was 19 inches long. She had olive skin, dark eyes and dark hair, and was in excellent health. There was no trace of her mother.
The teens later bought the baby a teddy bear -- possibly at the 7-Eleven, Chris said -- visited her in the hospital and went back to high school.
Source ~ Washington Post.
I have often wondered what happened to Jason. When I was assisting his mother at his birth, that Fourth of July, she told me he was not her first child. Where are they now?
The baby in the towels in Northern Virginia was adopted by a British couple. Mia discoverded on her own that she had been found on a doorstep.
At first, Mia said, it bothered her that she had been abandoned at birth, but then she became curious about the two teenagers who had saved her and whose teddy bear she still had.
(snip)
On Dec. 1, near the close of the college semester, Mia, a reserved and soft-spoken junior with dark hair and a tattoo of a bull on her left shoulder, discovered on Facebook a person who looked as though she might be Emily. She scrolled through Emily's list of friends and spotted the name Chris Astle. This had to be them.
(snip)
"Hi, I'm sorry to bother you," she wrote to Chris, "but if you are the Chris Astle I was looking for then I just want to thank you. You and Ms. Yanich found me on someone's doorstep when I was an infant. I don't really know what else to say, but thank you. If I've gotten the wrong person then I apologize! - Mia"
In his office, Chris read the message and exclaimed out loud.
Source ~ Washington Post
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Hope. Because.