The previous entry should have been prefaced with a paragraph I'll never manage to recreate now. But it said that Becca has told us we should look for signs and wonders in our lives during Epiphany. And it acknowledged that she is one of them. asking the questions that are too painful for me to ask, offering forgiveness and blessing when I can't offer it to myself.
posted by Sandy at 1:02 PM

Other signs and wonders:

snow, pink-lit from street lights or blue in the sun of children's voices

fever, which befuddles me but blessedly takes the edge off pain, floats me through vertigo and nausea, makes hours pass less cold and jagged

bananas, apparently. MSN says they haven't had sex for years and could be extinct in a decade. When I was a little girl, we had a visit from my great uncle who lived near the Georgia/Florida line. He brought us some boiled peanuts which I tried to like but couldn't. But then he told us that he had banana trees. I was as shy as a morning glory, but somehow I piped up and told him that being rich to me would be buying all the bananas I could eat. Got a lot of teasing for that but never backed down.

Almost every day, a little face turned up toward the computer high above her on the desk top, crying "La! La!" (she calls me Lolly, her mother's choice of name for grandmother). Most times, she gets the camera from the drawer and brings it to Christie so that she can talk to me, and she does, in a language that has something in common with Chinese. We've not yet been able to find a camera that works on this old laptop, but Kylie knows that I can see her, and, interestingly, she seems to think I'm in the camera rather than the speakers. I think I was left as blindsided as Mary by the birth of this child; I simply had no idea. Probably, I even considered people who seemed to wrap lives around grandchildren a little foolish. What is it, then? I couldn't even tell you. I've always loved babies. and in the first week of this one's life, as I took care of her for her sick mother, I appreciated her more than most of them because she was a part of me and of my daughter. But when I saw her next after two months, tiptoeing in to watch her sleep in her crib, I burst into tears. Don't think I didn't love her mother: I did, desperately. But there's some differerence in being a nineteen-year-old terrified mother and sharing an infant at this time of my life. I love this child purely, inexplicably, entirely, and even more because she loves me the same way. Her love for me is beyond explanation. I'm not the one who breastfed her. I'm only an occasional physical presence in her life. There's no agenda, no complications, no questions--Kylie simply loves me for me, without hesitation, and, even I can tell, very much. If this isn't a sign of God, I don't know what is.



posted by Sandy at 7:46 PM