It began with a simple act of kindness — a box of outgrown toddler clothes mailed to a stranger named Nura who’d replied to a giveaway post saying she had nothing warm for her daughter. I paid the postage myself and didn’t think much of it. My life was falling apart that year — grieving my mother, barely keeping up — so sending that box felt like a small thing in a world that suddenly felt very big.
A year later, a package arrived on my doorstep.
Inside were the same clothes, washed, folded, loved… and a tiny crocheted yellow duck — a childhood keepsake I hadn’t meant to give away. On top was a letter.
Nura wrote that she had escaped an abusive relationship with nothing but her child and fear. Those clothes, she said, kept them warm during the worst winter of her life. And the duck? Her daughter slept with it every night. “It kept the bad dreams away,” she wrote.
I called the number she’d left, and somehow a friendship began — slow, steady, real.
Messages became photos. Photos became shared meals. Our daughters became inseparable. When one of us struggled, the other showed up. Money passed hands, laughter filled kitchens, and kindness flowed both ways until it no longer mattered who first helped whom.
Now our children call each other cousins. The little yellow duck travels from one nightstand to another.
All because kindness, once sent out into the world, somehow finds its way back home.
