Her Hand Is Bigger Now

No longer plump with the extra pudge of toddlerhood when tiny fingers and cushy palms slipped - sweaty and small into my thin, bony mitts.  Thick around the knuckles but delicate in the digit, I took photos of her hand in mine in those early years with the idea to record its growth with this comparison shot every year.  Along the way somewhere I forgot my vow.

Now, today, she seems so grown, her thoughts rife with complexity, she astounds me.  I notice her hands as she fashions a shadow puppet on the wall.  Thinner, much thinner than those toddler hands, longer, more dextrous, still they are a child's hands with extra flesh and the stubby blunt fingernails easier for climbing.  They meet in small ways as she constructs ephemeral art with them.  Bracelets of colored elastic adorn her wrists still her fingers are too small for proper rings.  Her nails she keeps short and only occasionally polished.  

I am grateful to know in all her maturity, in all her distance from that cherub I attachment parented with momma gorilla-like ferocity, she is still a girl, my child, an angel of heart-rending proximity for at least a few more years.