BLOOM, my sweet 🌸

I know one of your favorite things was snow, because that meant mountains, that meant skiing, your face turned towards the sun. It meant you’d live another year beating me, laughing in my face. It meant another year of teasing, another year of wind burn, flubber bent legs, frozen hair, and riva to prima to ten. It meant another year of you, the most authentic & free version of you.

When I think of you, though, I’m reminded of spring. Of a forever blooming flower. A plant with seemingly more and more bulbs of pinks, yellows, and blues peeking through dark green, well-watered leaves. Your dreams. Your eyes. Your gentle hands and stubbornly firm feet. To choose a life that continues to build upon itself, dressed in extravagant outfits matched with pretty pink lipstick and leather gloves was maybe your greatest strength. forever striving to improve and understand people, their differences, their minds, their conflicts. To alter so much of yourself for the quirks that sparked your favorite’s hearts. To wear purple pants because someone you loved did too. You invested yourself in people with a compassion I have yet to fully capture in anyone else.

To have another year of watching you bloom is on my heart as my greatest wish today. To watch you stomp your feet like I did as a two year old. To hear you sing, eyeing and encouraging me to take the stage. To listen to you describe an exquisite meal topped with a squeeze-your-cheeks sweet has me aching for your hunger and thirst for life. And as I sit on yet another wickedly uncomfortable airplane seat, having just planned a trek to everest base camp, tears streaming down my face as I blurrily write this for you, i wish I could come home to you. To the eyes, blind by the end, continued to see all of me. To the wrinkled, thinned, fragile, so soft hands that I still feel matched in mine. To the arms that held me, danced with me, opened for me. To your stories, and the questions that always followed. To the sweets and the outings and the love.

I see you bloom in everything.

To you, grandma. Another year of riva to prima to ten. 🤍