Grayson,

Hooray! You’re officially a year old! I’ll probably be saying this the rest of my life, but I remember the day you were born. I remember the first time we saw you and how we all gasped as the nurse turned you around. A year later, you still look at the world with deep, serious eyes. The way you watch and think, think, think and you hold your hands in the most particular ways – that’s how you’ve been since the very beginning. These days,  you also smile and giggle and kick, kick, kick those feet. You love bouncing up and down, clap your hands, love being outside and make rhythms of all kinds by slapping your hands against the nearest surface. You’re more wriggly boy than baby and you’re about to officially become a big brother.

This past year, you have given me the great gift of seeing some of my most favorite people at new depths of sweet joy. I see the way your momma looks at you, cradles you, tells you she loves you and I suddenly see right down into her spirit and soul. I see your daddy, someone I have watched move from boy to teenager to man and if it’s even possible, I like him even more. He is the best, I want you to know. He’ll pick you up in the middle of the night when  your heart has just been broken and drive you all the way home because you need to escape. He’ll say and do hilarious things when you’re sad. He’ll catch your eye in a group when something happens and you’ll know exactly the sarcastic thing he’s thinking. He is silly and serious and that heart of his – it is so wide and deep. Watch it pour out over you and your momma, over your house and your family, over the kids he works with and the people he has connected his life to. And of all these things, it’s the most fun when I get to watch him with you. He loves you so very much.

You’ve let me see my own parents (Papa and Grandma) with new eyes. I don’t know if there’s a word to describe the light in their eyes when they hold you or look at you. I don’t think I’ve heard my mom giggle as much as she has in the last year. Every time they get down on the floor and play with you, I like to think I’m catching a glimpse 30 or 25 years into the past too.

Grayson, thank you for letting me see these things.

I’ll never forget when I rocked you to sleep on the last day of the year – December 31, 2013. As you fought your way into rest, tears slid down my face as all the moments of 2013- both the grimy and the glorious, both the heartaches and the new promises – washed over me. Holding you in my arms, there was no denying that in the midst of all of it, God was and is good, that he gives the greatest gifts, that He is indeed with us and that he never allows bitter without also providing sweet. I held you longer than I should have that night because I couldn’t let go of that incredible gift. Grayson, you are forever a sweetness in my life and the lives of so many others. Please don’t forget that.

 

Love always and always,

Aunt Cait