Many Happy Returns

What can be said when your daughter turns from her seventh year, shaking it off like an old dusty coat and turns bright faced into her eighth? What do you do when you wake up one morning and look at her and realize that she has lost every single ounce of baby chub you worked so hard to pack onto her frame and now she is a sleek gazelle of a girl? How do you adjust your eyes to the new light patterns that refract off of her as she morphs from a baby into a little girl on the verge of something bigger... ineffable?
You don't speak, you stand mute before her.
There is nothing you can do, you are helpless in her wake.
You can not adjust, you are a hapless victim of her metamorphosis.
So she turns eight and the honor of witnessing her growth and maturation belongs to Les and I. To see her begin to get brighter and brighter and spread out into the world like a winter sunrise is the most miraculous, spiritual, private and mesmerizing event that I have ever been privy to. Words in my native tongue fail me utterly at this point, and I suspect that from here on out I will be left faltering and floundering in an attempt to put to words what it is to be this near to such a person as she, as she grows.

Sometimes in stories there are these magic items, items of great power, items that have deep and ancient magic hidden within but somehow these objects become hidden and covered over to resemble every day objects. Mostly they perform just like their everyday counterparts but, when the right person is looking, or the light is just right, or the moon is full, or a wizard says the right words... the magic flares up and burns off the every day. Well, that's about what it's like being Evelyn's parents.
Most of the time, she is just a regular kid, laughing and joking and making toot jokes or driving me nuts with the fussing. But then...oh then... the light will hit her hair just right, or she will turn her head just so, or her brother will fall and need her succor, or she will say some freakishly deep statement about a movie or a book or a family situation and all of that everyday burns right off and we get a glimpse of what truly makes up her spirit.
And it is blinding.
And makes me realize that she is amazing.

So Happy Birthday to my magic bringer, may her eighth year be all that she can imagine and a bit more for good measure. May she find all of the lost things, may she hold on just a bit longer to the pure innocence and free spiritedness of childhood.