Your words shape your world, your values, who you are, how you love. Every relationship that truly reaches you develops it’s own lexicon that characterizes it, impacts your story, hems you into it, and sets it apart from all the others in the word. Moment by moment and laugh by laugh, we are creating our own household vocabulary because we want the legacy we leave as a family to be definable and worth talking about.

I sat in the loudest, most chaotic “library” I’ve ever been in, and leaned in close to talk with a teacher who is not actually a teacher. He thought it would be nice to try teaching, and the need is great, so he was placed in a classroom of 63 third graders. The teacher doesn’t always make it to class, but when he does, he doesn’t know what to do. He’s not even sure about all the subjects.

It was February 3, 2015, and I had just returned from a week out of town. Chris, the nice and neutral Tennessee man, whom I had bonded with about life in South Africa and come to respect on a deep level, wanted “to talk”. No, it did not play out like the romantic movie scene currently playing in your mind. And the only soundtrack was a 7-year old wild child, bouncing around in his underwear.

Dirty, desolate Benji has probably never had a smiling mama to wash away the dirt or to sing away the desolation. He lives with relatives, but he has no parents. He shares a living space inside a culture that feels no obligation to reach for you, touch you or sing over you if you are not their own. No matter how many baths he takes or how many people are around him, without being seen, reached for, touched, he will always be dirty, desolate Benji.

I found her homeless, lost and scared in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike on Galveston Island in 2008. Ms. Armstead was 87-years old and the evidence of her long life had been washed, tossed and left for debris in one night’s windstorm. I met Ms. Armstead in a hot, humid, roach-infested hotel room, and she couldn’t find her son.