Every morning Isabella went up to school bus with a problem that her father, despite all the efforts, had never really managed to solve: to fix her long hair as she would have desired.
She was 11 years old and lost her mother a few years earlier because of a disease.
Since then, her father had taken care of her.
He did what he could to face every aspect of everyday life, but with hairstyles and braids he had some difficulty.
Then Isabella noticed something.
The driver of her school bus, Tracy Dean, was fixing her hair to another girl.
Isabella found the courage to ask her a very simple question:
Could you do it with her?
Tracy said yes.
Since then, before the beginning of the lessons, those few minutes became a small habit.
Tracy used to comb her hair, make her braids and try different hairstyles.
She wasn't his mother.
And no one could have taken that place.
He was simply an adult who had noticed a need and found out he could do something.
The teachers soon noticed a change in Isabella.
The child seemed more confident.
For Tracy, that gesture also had a personal meaning: she also lost her mother as a child and knew how important it could be to meet adults willing to offer attention and presence.
This detail makes history more than just a hairstyle.
Tracy couldn't erase what Isabella had lost.
He couldn't replace his mother.
But he could give her a few minutes.
Every morning.
Constancy.
Sometimes we think that to really help someone need huge gestures.
But in the life of a child also a small routine can become important, especially when it communicates something without having to say:
"I saw you. I have time for you."
Eventually they were just hair settled before entering school.
And yet, for Isabella, they meant starting the day knowing that someone had stopped just to take care of her.