Adoption

The wind was calling. She could hear it at the window pane, the howl that it made down the chimney. When she walked down the street, it would swirl around her, fluttering against the hem of her skirt and tugging her forward as if it had grabbed the front of her coat.

It was a usual occurrence, nothing that hadn't happened before. At first, she had been curious, following where the wind took her. There was always a child at the end of the journey. Mary had lingered, forever inquisitive and quick-witted. She knew there was a reason for this calling and it did not take her long to understand why.

Her mother had asked her why she couldn't pursue another career; one of her hobbies might be nice. Or there was always marriage.

Mary had promised to think about it, although it was a promise quickly broken. The wind grew stronger, more persistent with each visit. Once a breeze, now a gust. She wasn't sure if she wanted to wait until a tornado appeared.

Children who lived close to her family home were no longer an option, it seemed, for if she allowed herself to be carried away, she literally would be. Mary did not oppose flying but there was a time and a place for it. And the fact that she went face first into a lamppost one quiet morning did not help matters.

Yet, the wind did not wait for her. She could only ignore the calling of her name for so long, the way it whispered in her ear, before the last ounce of will she had left disappeared and she was swept into the sky. After demanding that it put her down, for she was a respectable young woman, it often did, and she never discovered where it planned to take her.

It wasn't until her next birthday when she received a present from an estranged uncle, his name hardly legible where he had signed it, that she began to realise that her family may have a collection of peculiar talents. Unwrapping the box, she found, to her dismay, that he had sent her an umbrella. One with a parrot on the end. Mary wasn't a snob but she wasn't particularly fond of the design either.

She propped it against the wall and even further to her dismay, heard it make a sarcastic remark about her lovely new hat the week after. After a heated debate, it told her something that she knew she had to hear. It had occurred to her several times and still, she had stifled it within the deep recesses of her mind.

"People spend a lifetime searching for a calling, for a purpose. Here you are with the world at your feet and you choose to ignore it. You have to become the person you are meant to be, else what good will you be married off or working as a seamstress?"

That career option had never occurred to her but for the sake of the argument, she pretended it had. "Being a seamstress is a respectable career choice."

"But it's not for you."

To keep it quiet, she took it out one day when it was raining. It complained the whole way to the butchers. On the way back, she felt the wind tug, more vicious than usual. Catching under the umbrella, it lifted her into the air and hurled her across the London sky. She asked to be put back, demanded it, until she realised there was no point. The umbrella looked at her with a glint in its beady black eye.

"I suppose you're happy," she remarked.

"You can't ignore the wind forever," it told her, a bit too smartly for her liking.

The wind only lowered her to the ground when they were somewhere near Kent. Mary was less than pleased but as she wandered down the country lane, having attempted to fly with the umbrella before conceding defeat, she found three small children shouting and pushing each other.

Mary looked at them for a while before sighing heavily. "Well, if I must, I must."

After demanding that they stop fighting, she received a scathing greeting from the eldest, his grubby finger pointing up at her.

"And who might you be?"

"Me?" she exclaimed incredulously. Her grip tightened on the umbrella handle, back straightening to display some sort of authority over them. She was barely a woman herself. "Why, I'm Mary Poppins!"

"What's that gotta do with you bossing us around?"

She hesitated, her gaze carefully scrutinising the three children. The answer was already prepared; it had been for several months and still, she wasn't sure if she was ready to say it. Her lips parted and she heard the words tumbling out before she could stop herself.

"I am a nanny, if you must know, and I am sure that children have better things to do than fight like cannibals at the roadside. You could be trampled by a horse. Then what would you do?"

Leading them home, she noticed the umbrella wink at her. She did not wink back. There was no doubt in her mind that she had crossed the line, one that she had carefully tread upon for quite some time. Yet, the wind had called her and she had responded. This was where she was meant to be and nobody other than Mary Poppins could answer to the task at hand.

This is way way longer than I intended it to be, but I went where the story took me. There's a couple more that are quite long so this won't be the only one.