By Joan Bunting, April 25, 2019 — When I was a baby or very young, I really don’t know how old I was, my sister Bertha was holding me on her lap. Back then Mother had a potbelly stove for which she did her cooking. I don’t really remember this incident but I was told that there was a pot of hot coffee on the stove. We must have been sitting pretty close because I reached over and pulled the coffee pot off of the stove and we both were scalded. I have a scar on my right wrist and on my right thigh. It’s not the kind of scars that leaves lumps or bumps. In fact, they are hardly noticeable. There’s just a slight discoloration on both areas.
Well, after the four of us — my sister Bertha, my oldest brother Theodore, my sister Doris and myself — was placed with our second foster mother, we called her Mom, we had to go to Sunday school and church every week. Mom was very proper and very particular about cleanliness. We would be sitting in church and all of a sudden she would take my right arm and start rubbing my wrist with the burn. My sister Doris had to tell her a couple of times that it wasn’t dirt on my wrist but a burn.
When I pulled that pot of hot coffee on my sister and myself, later years proved to me that God was with us. It could so easily have turned out a lost worse than it did.