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Hermit Crab's Home |
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 The last box of
clothes was carried out of the house. Now it was empty
and the small boy wandered through the rooms that echoed
with the sound of his steps.It seemed so different from the home he had grown up in his whole life. He sat down on the bottom step of the stairway and began to cry. Father heard him and came down the stairs and sat beside him. He didn't have to ask why the boy was crying. He knew, because he too felt the same sadness at leaving their house. But Father remembered a story Grandfather had told him. He took his son's hand and said to him, "At the beach, Hermit Crab lives in the empty shell of a snail. When Hermit Crab was young he found a pretty white shell that he could fit comfortably inside. It wasn't too big for his small legs to carry. It was the perfect home. "But as he grew, his home began to get too small for him. He spent many days searching and eventually he found a larger, brown snail shell to be his house. Reluctantly, he crawled out of his old white shell and into his new brown one. "His old home lay empty on the sand. He was sad to leave his pretty white shell behind. "'But,' Hermit Crab said to himself, 'this new brown one is really very nice and gives me more room to grow. I'm already beginning to feel like it's my home.'" Father said to his son, "Our family is like Hermit Crab. We've outgrown this house and we need to move to one that fits us better." "But I like having our home in this house." said the boy. Father replied, "Once we are at our new house and all our things are put away, you'll find it becomes a home just like this place is. You'll discover, just like Hermit Crab did, that home is more about who is living in a house than about what it looks like." Sample story from: Salmon's Journey and More Northwest Coast Stories Copyright 2001 Robert James Challenger ISBN 1-894384-34-2 |
