One of the most pleasant ways to spend a lazy hour or two is on the couch reading books with eight year old girls. Lillian is immersed in the convoluted dragon world of Wings of Fire, in which dragons wreak havoc on one another for mysterious reasons. In the book I am reading, humans are the villains (they are nastier than dragons).
We are both thoroughly modern readers: we switch comfortably from print to digital — and back. She has her own Kindle, and, as in the picture above, is happy to borrow her Yia Yia’s iPad if her Kindle or current book are not with her.
When we sit on the couch, she will often use my knee as a footstool. Sometimes she looks up and sees me looking at her foot and smiling.
“What’s funny?” she’ll say.
“Nothing, really. I just like looking at your foot.”
At that, she’ll roll her eyes (she is a very skilled eye-roller) and return to her book.
That foot — her left one — is a wonder to me. When I first saw it, it was about half the size of my thumb; now it’s longer than my hand. But the real wonder is that that foot was, for the first few months of her life, the conduit for all of the blood and water and medicines that helped her live and grow and thrive. Her foot was the only place the nurses could reliably put IVs in her tiny body. You can still see some of the scars from all of those needles.
So when I sit with this kind and smart and sometimes funny and sometimes serious girl, I look at the foot she casually rests on my knee and smile.
She thinks her grandfather is just a little weird.
The Denby Clan 