In my years teaching students with special needs, I found myself embracing the minds and  hearts of the children. Mat, a boy of sixteen, was a teenager when he entered my work program. He would say, “hi, bye, Mat, and girl” and would smile all the time. One spring day it was just Mat and me as we drove in the school van to a volunteer site where Mat would learn work skills. The day was lovely and thinking out loud I said, “What a beautiful spring day!”  To my surprise Mat commented, “I chase the butterflies!”  To say I was stunned was an understatement. Mat had been my student for two years and had never spoken more that one word.  I replied, “Yes Mat, what else happens in spring?”

“Birds sing,”he said.  Mat talked more after that and today he is a grown man and has a job in a workshop.  In all the years teaching I found there was so much more in the hearts and minds of my students then I would have ever guessed. My students continued to teach  me lessons of patience, unconditional love and to expect the unsuspected. I loved the story of Mat so much that in my novel, To Catch an Angel, little Emma Rose who is mute chases butterflies. She speaks for the first time in the novel too and to me it has such a special meaning.  Angels are everywhere and especially for me  Mat and all my students will forever be my  angels unaware.