ampersand.

“Make that loop a little larger. See like this”

His lengthy fingers wrapped themselves gracefully around the purple crayon. He looped and loped the ampersand. To the small child sitting next to him, it looked like the letter "g".

She couldn’t be sure though, she was still learning her letters. Her eyes set and her brow furrowed, chubby fingers grasping her own crayon-still purple, her favorite color. Brown tendrils fell in front of her eyes and she pressed her lips hard together. She leaned into the counter, putting all the strength she could muster into shaping that symbol the little muscles in her arms fighting fatigue and weakness, fighting for the creation of this masterpiece.

Eyes shining in admiration, he smiled, the deep wrinkles round the edges filling with joy.

He wanted so badly to move the young girl’s curls back from her eyes. His hands and fingers were like sandpaper and he was afraid to touch her young, immaculate, innocent skin.

His years shown on his skin and his experiences in his eyes. She still had so much to live.

He wrote out:

GRANDPA & MEAGHAN

I LOVE YOU FOREVER

&

FOR ALWAYS

The slanted letters capitalized and squared. His engineering career long over, but ever-present.

The scrap of paper nothing before, but now the most important document in these youthful hands.

She tried and tried to copy the words and the shapes just how he had written them.

But she was unable to capture the power behind those words. The impact they had,still have, to this day.

Not til many years, many books and many broken crayons and crumpled pages of attempts littered her floor.

She went so long with being unable to express her true feelings. And even now, as she writes her words in her bound black notebooks, some sentences slanted and capped, she can see his eyes shining down on her. If only he could still reach out and move that curl back, the roughness of his skin, polishing her radiant, now seasoned skin.