by María Eugenia Guerra

I have a license to speak of Emily in superlatives; I am her grandmother

There's this way that Emily walks with her arms out for balance, one at a right angle, the other out in front. Though she walks haltingly -- because for now these are all tentative steps -- I don't think I have ever seen such grace and beauty.

I'm her grandmother, and I have a license to say that.

I had the recent pleasure of seeing Emily take her first long walk across the room while I sat at the dinner table with her parents and her Uncle Emilio. She had the most magnificent smile on her face as she locked eyes with her father and walked toward him. His own eyes welled with moisture at the sight of her.

This mobility is new for all of us, and it is wonderful to witness, just as it is to hear the 25 or so words of her ever-expanding vocabulary in both languages. It's a thrill to hear her call my name and to hear tender inflections in her voice when she says “Mamá” or “Papá”or “Mía,” the name she's given our dearest friend Malia.

Wow-wows are still pretty high on the interest list for Emily. She owns quite a few stuffed pooches and many, many books featuring dogs. Her mother reports that when she wakes at night to dogs barking in the distance she answers, “Rruff” and goes back to sleep.

Emily's long been aware of Duchess, her father's chocolate Labrador, but now she can walk up to this big, sweet wow-wow for some face-to-face contact. I'm pretty sure Emily perceived Duchess as the best, largest toy she'd ever seen, because she kept trying to move her by lifting one of her paws. She was far more enthralled with Duchess than Duchess was with her.

On her own initiative Emily recently pushed a low wicker stool to my rocking chair in the office and methodically climbed up to the seat. How did she know how to do that?

I remembered I had bought a small rocking chair for her more than a year ago in that wild shopping madness that overcomes all new grandmothers. I found it, along with the saddle in the closet “for things her grandmother bought that she can't use yet.” Emily knew exactly what to do with the little sillón.

There's this thing we do at the end of the day when for the moment she is mine, all mine. She sits on the windowsill near my desk. We look through a book, of late a Richard Scarry book, and Emily identifies animals and objects, largely wow-wows, apples, cats, and gahs (birds) while I read to her. Or we play with a handful of musical instruments – a small tambourine, a toy accordion, a couple of maracas.

When the story or the play is over, we look out the window and watch hummingbirds at the Mimosas or an occasional cat who takes the route of our driveway into the property behind us. As the late afternoon light dims we sit quietly, Emily on the sill and me so close that all the air I breathe is the sweet essence of her lovely little being.