I had a feeling that “this” was the antique glass cake pedestal that I store on the top shelf of the baking cupboard.  I hustled into the kitchen to find Eden squatting on the counter with the pedestal beside her.  She was smiling widely and seeing her rang a sort of bell, but I wasn’t sure what.  I rifled my visual memory for photographs of her or her sister and then I realized, she was making me think of me.  Squatting there on the counter, a sweet and utterly satisfied smile on her face, she was an echo of a younger me, except with Paul’s blue and sleepy eyes.

I don’t usually look for myself in my children; producing three near clones of their father has kept me from that.  And yet there are times, like this morning, where our likenesses flash out and I see, if for only a moment, that I am not just a conduit, but a spring, a well.