Children Playing

As with your shadow I with these did play

~ Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

I was thinking about what to write today as I read the words above.  And it came to my mind, my childhood.

I thought about how my grandparents were 100% my grandparents when I was a child.  In reality they were not my original grandparents.  But as a child I didn’t know any difference.

To their credit, they did treat us as though we were, even though they knew the secret that we were not.  I do not know in what ways they didn’t wholeheartedly feel that we were theirs.  They were my grandparents because of adoption – both of my parents having been adopted in the first year of their life.

I think about how we simply accepted them as what they were called – Granny and Granddaddy and Grandmother.  We played as children at their feet and minded them with all the same authority.  We could not know how it might have been different because it was not.