I just got back from Helotes after a happy Saturday and Sunday with Elena and the dogs.
When the lockdown started, I was afraid. What if the lockdown lasted a month or two? What if the distance changed the way it had always been?
I'm sort of prepared for the inevitable changes of teenaged years, but I wasn't prepared to lose our weekly get togethers in her 9th year and to miss Thanksgiving, birthday parties and overnight visits.
As it happened, this was exactly like times together before COVID. "Let's have popcorn while we watch a movie," she said, "Like we always do"--as if nothing had happened in the intervening year.
She bathed Charley in the bathtub and prepared to bathe Luci, but Luci was having none of it. We took the dogs to play at the school playground and laughed when Luci ran at lightning speed all over the playground. We met Bonnie at El Chapparal for dinner, my first sit down meal in a restaurant in months--just as delicious as it always is there, still my favorite Mexican food in the county.
On the way to Helotes she said, "I'm trying not to be sad. I don't want to say goodbye to you and Luci."
I borrowed a line from NomadLand: "We don't have to say good-bye; let's just say we'll see each other down the road." She liked that.
"I'm very interested in my ancestry," she said. So we decided to make a book in which she can interview relatives and record family stories. "I'm very proud to be Mexican," she said, "But I've never been to Mexico."
At dinner tonight, she told her mom, "Yenna told me the coolest stories about my ancestors on her side."
I'm trying not to be sad because this weekend is over. I'm actually over the moon happy to have had it!
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