Once upon a time, there was a little girl who didn’t heed the warning from the story “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” She had difficulty expressing her emotions and would, too often, cry or scream uncontrollably in dramatic response to small situations. This led to her parents, most specifically her mother, not responding to her cries immediately, due to her history of outbursts.
On this particular day, though the little girl screamed from the front yard, the mother didn’t come to see why until her older sister reported that “Penny was stuck in a tree.”
“Just tell her to climb down the way she climbed up,” the mother replied calmly.
“No Mom,” the older sister clarified. “She’s stuck way up high.”
When the mother finally came out to see what was what, she craned her neck further and further and finally spotted the little girl about 12-14 feet up the aspen tree in the front yard. She was indeed stuck because she had broken some supporting branches on her climb up and therefore couldn’t use them to climb back down!
The mother was at a loss. Apparently this time, the little girls’ screams were valid! She didn’t know how to get the little girl down. She couldn’t climb up after her, she didn’t have their tall ladder (it was south of town with Daddy), and the best she could come up with was perhaps driving their car close to the tree so she could reach the little girl from the roof of the car.
Thankfully, after a few minutes of trying to soothe the little girl and come up with a feasible solution, a friendly neighborhood couple came walking past and offered to help. They brought their ladder over and set it up.
It was actually just barely tall enough for the gentlemanly neighbor to reach the little girl, and she scampered into his arms like a kitten to a fireman.
The little girl ran straight into her mother’s arms, and all was right in the world again.
I wish I could end this story by saying that the little girl had learned her lesson.
