Earth school

I ran across one of those frivolous social media memes that asked questions. One was: Who comes to mind as simply the most delightful human you know, the most delicious person to be around. My husband was sitting at the breakfast bar and I tossed it out to him to answer with me. We looked at each other and smiled, because we both knew, hands down, the answer was our daughter. It is not that our girl never has dark moods, never gets grumpy, never spirals into anxiety (look who her mother is), but she carries a light inside and around her. Somehow, when she walks into a room, the mood brightens, joy arrives, and she doesn't even know she has this power. Her smile is a radiant thing. It literally warms you, makes you feel that all will be well. She is a healer, that one, without even doing anything, even as she herself struggles through the whole rollercoaster repertoire of human experiences. How does she manage this duality? How does she confer such grace on others even in those moments when she is roiling herself? I wish I could save her from every hard emotional passage in this life. Is it too much to wish that our children should never suffer? Ha. Fortunately, she's does talk therapy, and so she is a student in the ways of actively managing the ever surging feelings and perceptions that are a feature, not a bug, of this earth school. 

I love that photo of our girl. It's from a shoot she did in her cousin's kitchen in Dallas. She makes her signature caramel apple pies every Thanksgiving, and wanted new photos for her website where people log on to make their orders. While she was in Dallas a few weeks ago, she decided her cousin's kitchen would make an elegant backdrop for those photos, so she baked a pie and pressed another cousin, who is a talented image maker and social media coordinator for Marvel Comics Universe, into service to take the photos. In years past, my girl baked the pies in her kitchen, but this year, she reached out to her godmother, who has a cake baking company and works out of an industrial kitchen in Brooklyn, to see if she could rent space alongside her during the week before Thanksgiving. Her aunt said she didn't need to pay her any rent, but she did need to get herself professionally certified before she could use the kitchen, so she's now doing that. Our girl is scaling up.