Amazing Grace

Staying with my oldest daughter and her young family for a week, while she recovers from an injured back, has been memorable.  I appreciate her and my son-in-law's tolerance of my urges to straighten, clean and wash everything in sight.  Maybe I'm trying to make up for all the years when I was raising our five young children.  A couple of evenings we've stayed up late talking about one topic after another, like we were starving for someone to listen.  It's an insatiable appetite that never seems to be filled.

I study the family's schedule and careful choreography, as the needs of their son, with autism, are met.  I am learning to see people through different eyes and with a different heart.  I hear my daughter's two little girls giggling as they climb on the bed beside their mother, trying to brush her hair and be close.  She giggles and laughs with them.

Beyond her sliding glass door, I see children's small boot prints criss cross through several inches of freshly fallen snow.  Squirrels skitter along the branches of the trees.  In the field behind her house, flocks of geese soar and land again and again.  Their muffled honking complements the delicate ring of the chimes hanging on her back porch, to the tune of Amazing Grace.