The joy of the Christmas spirit is having my great-niece, Graham, a three-year old beautiful little girl who rarely sees me, come over and ask me to play with her. Or our delightful little two-year-old Tatum, who somehow remembers the weekend we spent with them in New Hampshire when I helped teach her some fun things. Once I looked down at the gentle tugging on my pants leg and looked down at this adorable little face smiling up at me; was shocked to see how exactly she looked like her mother, my niece, at that age. Picked her up and called her by her mother’s name. My sister and I argued playfully with her daddy that there was not a shred of him in her; that it was an obvious clone job managed the year he was overseas for six months’ service in the Navy.
My niece Alisa (Graham’s mom) looks beautifully healthy after the scare she gave us with the brain tumor this past summer. She’s still on medication to prevent some mild recurrences of seizures, but seems fine. My nephew, John needs his framed certificates for his office, and my niece Erica will be completing her master’s before her family leaves for Spain. The youngest, Jessie, is designing websites (just like one of her sisters –the other one’s in data research and analysis, and John’s an engineer) for K-2 Snowboards out in Washington state. Our great niece Zoee is quite a smart young lady at age 10, and her brother Leif (7) is at that neato-stage. They’ll be so much different in three years when they come back from Spain, although there will be, I’m sure many visits, and I’m planning to go out in May or June to visit overseas.
I feel relaxed, tired, happy. Now I must go and study stats.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology