The Composition book

“Amatxu! I can’t believe we had this and you never told me!”

Great, what did I do this time?, I think while I wait for my daughter to come back from the garage and show me what I failed to share with her. The kids love rummaging through all the stuff I’ve got piled up in there (you know, selling the house, keeping it tidy, blah, blah, blah). It’s like a treasure hunt for them. Like Christmas all over again.

Maitane is holding one of those 0.99 cent notebooks you buy at Walmart at the beginning of the school year. An unused Composition book long forgotten amid the pictures, files and toys that didn’t make the cut when the decorator lady came over to rearrange and stage my house before I put it up for sale. Two seconds later, she’s got her name plastered all over the front, as if there was any chance her brother would try to claim it for himself. I mean, you can’t just type on it. You need an actual pen to write out the words.

It’s only been three days since the discovery, and she’s already filled about a third of the pages, sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish. There is the tale about “Cutey” the cat and “Honey” the dog, who became “firends” at an early age, moved in together as teenagers, and ended up being happy ever after. She also wrote about our Scottie dog Wallace, who passed away a couple of days ago at the age of ten, a note about Ortuella and aitite, amama, izeko, osaba and her friends from the park, about her friend Livia and the Dual Language program at school.

I love reading my daughter’s stories because – once I manage to decipher her handwriting – they provide me with another way to know her better, to find out what’s going on in that 7-year old mind of hers, what’s important to her, how she feels about death or deals with missing her family in Euskadi. I love seeing her grab the book on her own accord, sit on the couch, and write and write for the longest periods of time.

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