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When Martha was almost three I took her and Dirk to Minnesota to help my mother after a surgery. We had been there a week and the day came to go home. My mother lives in a condo on the 16th floor over an Embassy Suites hotel in downtown Minneapolis.
I had gone somewhere with the kids and after parking the car in the underground parking ramp I got a shopping cart to take a sleeping Martha up and to help bring the luggage back down. In the elevator a really sharp looking couple talked to me about how precious the sleeping Martha looked. We only had a little while before we needed to leave for the airport, so I started to load the luggage in the shopping cart right away when we got to my mom’s condo. When I said it was time to go, both kids ran down the long hallway to the elevator ahead of me while I struggled pushing a heavy shopping cart behind them over carpet. All of a sudden I heard Dirk shouting and left the luggage and ran ahead to find only Dirk standing in front of the elevators. He said that Martha had got on- I said which one and tried to get that elevator back. When it opened a maintenance man with a floor washing bucket thing was on and I asked if he had seen my daughter and he said, “no one was on” when he entered. Then I pretty much started to fall apart. Between the fact that this was a 24-story building and connects by skyways to most of downtown and that strangers are scary – I was freaking out. The maintenance man said; “let’s get down to the security on the first floor.” I was encouraged, as I pictured us looking at security camera monitors and finding her quickly. That was not how the security person saw it… She said, okay you start on the lowest floor and I’ll go high… and then I realized we were really in trouble. I went down to the parking area and when I opened the door, my mom was walking in and I said – Melissa is missing… in big sobbing cries and even though I had just showed too much emotion about Grandma’s cat… She figured it out when she saw that I only had Dirk with me. She said… “That’s ridiculous”, to the idea of going from floor to floor, and said, “let’s go back up to security.” Well when the elevator door opened – the first thing we saw was that sharp looking couple talking to the security woman with Martha right there. Turns out that out of all the floors, Martha had ended up on their floor and she had walked off and went down the hall just like you would to my mom’s condo. She wandered past their door, which miraculously was held open (breaking a condo association rule, not to leave your door open, because it sucks the AC from the halls…) The woman thought she saw Martha walk by out of the corner of her eye and went out and found her.
Talk about Miracles… out of all the people that live in that building – the only ones I had chatted with all week – found Martha. Coincidence – I think not.
