Dear Cheetah, age 7,<\/p>\n
I hope you are fine. \r\nReally and truly fine, \r\nnot the fake fine we learned to tell mom and dad when they asked, \r\n\u201cWhat was the trouble? Why aren\u2019t you sleeping?\u201d\r\nI writing you today to tell you that that you are amazing and you are safe. \r\nDon\u2019t be scared.\r\nI know it isn\u2019t easy to sleep, but don\u2019t scare yourself \r\nYou are fine.\r\nIsn\u2019t it funny how protected you are in your innocence?\r\nI was telling Mom just the other day \r\n- she\u2019s older that Grandma now, by the way - \r\nI told her about all of the neighbors that used to give you candy, so you didn\u2019t have to cross the street to go to the store. \r\nThey let the whole neighborhood play in their yards. \r\nWhy, without fences, it was hard to tell where one yard ended and the next one started.\r\nAnd they didn\u2019t care.\r\nI wanted to write to you and tell you that you jump farther from the swings than anyone can. \r\nThat\u2019s why Mr. Gulleckson called you Cheetah. \r\nI guess you looked like a cat to him.\r\nDon\u2019t be so hard on yourself and if you could, \r\nplease practice being on time \r\nso you aren\u2019t grounded your entire fourth grade year.\r\nTake care of yourself,\r\nLaurie, Cheetah no longer\r\nPS write back soon!<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dear Cheetah, age 7, I hope you are fine. Really and truly fine, not the fake fine we learned to tell mom and dad when they asked, \u201cWhat was the trouble? Why aren\u2019t you sleeping?\u201d I writing you today to tell you that that you…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":215,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1136],"tags":[2461],"class_list":["post-52622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marathon-poem","category-official-marathon-prompts","tag-hour11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/215"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52622"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52869,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52622\/revisions\/52869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}