way cool!

there's a light in the window
Just a little bragging post about the coolest guy on the east coast: dear great grandson Dante (15 months old next week). I've just learned that the family (daughter, two granddaughters, Dante and his father) may come out here this summer. It will be Dante's first taste of the southwest and (dare we hope?) he learns to love it as much as his mother does. She first came out with her mother when she was 3 1/2, a year after we moved west, and began to fly out alone from New York at 5 1/2. She was unafraid. Bold. Carried a sense of adventure in her heart and a Big Bird backpack on her shoulders. For those first couple of years she flew into Denver and we drove 5 1/2 hours to pick her up! She was too little for connections and Denver was the closest direct flight from NY. By seven, however, she was making connections (with airline personnel help). We'd meet her at the Albuquerque airport and she'd rush into our arms. Whoever was in charge would laugh and ask for our IDs before she could be "officially" turned over to us. The moment we arrived home after the long three-hour drive up to Taos and she'd upacked from her oversized suitcase the collection of stuffed animals and Beanie Babies (she once brought 55 of them), she would demand request that we bake cookies. It became a tradition that lasted for several years. The preferred cookies were gingerbread bears which she decorated, and we ate them until the cookie jar was empty, which may or may not have coincided with her return home - in which case we'd have to bake again. I do miss having the little girl Kira here every summer, but we hope to get under Dante's skin too, eventually, and maybe one day in the future he will rush into our arms at the airport (as long as we're still ambulatory). And I guess we'll switch to gingerbread boys.

If you were coming in the fall,
I'd brush the summer by
With half a smile and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly.
     Emily Dickinson (Consecration. VI, first stanza)