Time is Short

On my lovely afternoon walk to the library, Elodia called me to say that she had to be somewhere at 3:00 and was unsure if we should meet at 2:30. I said that since she had to be somewhere on campus that we could still meet and get as much done as possible. I arrived at the library and snagged a table on the loud side near a window. As I waited I watched people. People reading, people working in groups, people coming and going on their way to study or to take a break from the long day. I soon realized that Elodia was headed toward me with a bright smile. I was glad to see her and as she sat, she was already explaining her day. Her daughter had called her that morning to tell her that she was due on Saturday. The baby boy would be Elodia's third grandchild, but first grandson. Elodia said it had been a rough pregnancy and she was worried for her daughter. I said things would be fine and she should try not to worry. She then explained that she hadn't brought anything with her because she had left the house stressed that morning, and even though she had completed the homework she was disappointed she had not remembered to bring it. I told her not to worry and since we only had a short time we started working on an activity that I had made on contractions. The first part had several sentences with many words that could be made into contractions such as "I am" to "I'm" and "did not" to "didn't." Elodia had a lot of trouble finding them. I think maybe it was because I had put so many in each sentence, but it became easier for her as she worked through them. She had to underline the words that should be changed and write the contraction below. She had a lot of trouble spelling them even when she knew what contraction it should be. I explained that most contractions were putting the two words together and only omitting one letter like most of the ones with "not," like "wasn't." We moved on to the next part of the activity, which contained sentences with lots of contractions and parenthesis by the contractions for the words to be spelled out, such as "shouldn't (should not)." This part was easier for her, but I wondered if she had studied the contractions handout I'd given her last week. Time was short, and she soon had to leave. I gave her a handout on helping verbs with an activity for homework since she had struggled with them in our other sessions and I thought it would help as we are going to work on verbs in the weeks to come. I told her I hoped things went well with her soon-to-arrive grandson and that she should write a short paper on his delivery if he did come on Saturday like the doctors predicted. She smiled with an overwhelming joy that one only sees come from a grandmother and I smiled back and said good-bye.