When we lived in California and Albuquerque there were no grandparents within a thousand mile radius. Well, there were grandparents. Just not ours.
I carried a chip the size of a hard drive on my shoulder about it. Every November I whined to anyone who dared to inquire.
"No, we won't be spending Thanksgiving with extended family. Or Christmas. We live too far away. " I sighed for emphasis.
One year an elderly man and his wife brought over a basket of wrapped gifts for my kids and a loaf of warm bread. On the card he wrote each of my children's names with a little star beside it.
He cared about them.
When I looked up from the signature I saw him in a new light. He was not their grandfather. But he was an elderly man with gray hair and a rolling chuckle. Maybe in my obstinate focus on what we did not have I had completely overlooked what we did.
There is a woman in town who never married. But she has not let that exclude her from the fun. Every week for ten years she invited other people's children over, to bake cookies and share tea. She taped their crayoned portraits on her wall and wrapped stuffed bears with bright ribbons to put under the tree. Sometimes she took them to the zoo.
Probably the One who orchestrates the Northern lights and the migration of monarch butterflies could have arranged it so that grandparents always lived up the street and everyone who wanted children got them.
But then there would be no reason to cross pollinate.
