I am running far far far! behind this week in my writing. Two sermons put me a bit behind, but I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to write this story. Meet up with Patricia’s other words contributors at

Attention is generosity…

This week we are being asked to write a story based off of the quote,

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
Simone Weil

Here is my story

Pay Me Some Mind

by JE Lillie

Mother hated him. She said he was beneath my station, dumb as a box of hair and ugly as a fencepost.

Papa affectionately called him “the leech.”

He was none of those things. Maybe Pavel wasn’t Robert Redford. Maybe he didn’t have a degree from Harvard. But he was a hard worker and he had a heart of gold. More important, he chose me.

I suppose I should not have expected Mother and Papa to understand. They were good people just busy…always busy. Mother had her charities, Papa had his work and clubs. I had my nannies, a new one every two years like clockwork to make sure I never got too attached. I don’t think Mother ever really chose Papa and maybe Papa never chose Mother. I always felt like neither of them chose me.

 I suppose it’s not a wonder, then, that my parents and I grew to value different things. I suppose it is a wonder I grew to value anything at all. But somewhere between nannies four and five I realized I desperately wanted someone who would stay by my side and never leave.

I still remember the day we first met. He was working in the garden alongside his father who had been hired by our groundskeeper to pull the weeds. I was on the rope swing under the weeping willow. He clipped two yellow roses from my mother’s garden and brought them to me. Mother had never let me touch her roses. It was scandalous and more generous than he could ever know. I was his from that moment.