I spied him today, white-haired and smiling. He pushed a stroller, a proud grandpa with a blond-headed toddler smiling under the stroller’s awning. His smile, though fleeting through my windshield, stirred something in me. A longing.

It happens to me from time to time as a fatherless girl. I wonder if my sweet sister feels the same way.

All I know is that often I think the wound is nothing, neither festering or scarred. But then I see a kindly grandfather and I remember my father, now gone from this earth thirty-one years, would be the grandfather to my children.

The truth? I don’t think a girl ever gets over being fatherless.