For Gracyn, soon to be 9 years old

The day before St. Patrick’s Day, Gracyn and Griffin came over to make leprechaun traps. We sat on the floor with two cardboard boxes, colored paper, tape, glue, leftover Easter basket grass, jewels (because jewels are always a positive addition to any project!), pom poms, and whatever else we could find in our craft cupboard. Thirty minutes later, they had created two authentic traps destined to lure any self-respecting leprechaun.

The next morning, however, Gracyn pulled me aside and said, “Grandma, my mom told me the real truth about leprechauns.”

“The real truth?” I probed.

“You know, about how leprechauns are just make-believe. That truth,” she explained.

In that second, I was transported back to my third grade year, the year I learned the “real truth” about Santa. I may have cringed visibly, but I hope it was just internal cringing, the cringing of a grandmother who loves a little-girl-soon-to-be-a-young-lady.

But she smiled and winked. Then I breathed again and ventured, “It’s fun to be the one in on the secret, the one who can make it special for Griffin, isn’t it?”

She nodded, and I could see that she was already thinking, imagining, planning what she would do with her brother’s leprechaun trap. The girl has a memory and mind like a steel trap, and she remembered that I had a small leprechaun gift tag that had been in the bottom of the craft drawer for several years. She told me to distract Griffin, and she headed to the basement–the dark basement, the basement she never enters on her own–to retrieve the leprechaun and hide it in her coat pocket.

When I visited their house the next day, Griffin ran out carrying the leprechaun that Gracyn had lovingly placed in his trap. “Look, Grandma! I got one!” he cried.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Gracyn beaming. In an instant, she had transitioned from leprechaun-getter to leprechaun-giver. In an instant, she looked less like a little girl and much more like a young lady. And in this instant, I felt the promise of a new season, which would undoubtedly prove to be just as lovely as the last.

In truth, I witnessed the first sprouts of this season several weeks earlier. Classroom queen for the week, Gracyn invited me to sit with her and two chosen friends for lunch. As we unpacked our lunches on the special table reserved for just such occasions, one of her friends began to tell me of all the pets she had. She had pets at her mom’s house, and–she said expectantly–reptilian pets of all sorts at her dad’s house. For ten minutes, she and the other friend regaled me with pet stories, each one more curious and spectacular than the last. All the while, Gracyn nibbled away at her sandwich and listened.

As the lunch period was coming to a close, Gracyn looked at her friend with the reptilian multitudes and said, “Tell my grandma about. . .”

And there it was: the tangible sprouts of transition. My sweet granddaughter deferred the entire lunch period to her friends, allowing them to take the throne that she, as classroom queen, was gifted for the day. As the other lunch tables began to empty and students lined up at the door, Gracyn smiled, gave me a quick hug, and said, “Thanks for coming, Grandma. See you tonight.”

Be still my heart! Such graciousness, such magnanimity, such guileless generosity. This was the sprout that would soon blossom in a single act on St. Patrick’s Day.

Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris, biologist, speaker, and consultant, writes:

Caterpillars chew their way through ecosystems leaving a path of destruction as they get fatter and fatter. When they finally fall asleep and a chrysalis forms around them, tiny new imaginal cells, as biologists call them, begin to take form within their bodies. The caterpillar’s immune system fights these new cells as though they were foreign intruders, and only when they crop up in greater numbers and link themselves together are they strong enough to survive. Then the caterpillar’s immune system fails and its body dissolves into a nutritive soup which the new cells recycle into their developing butterfly. 

The caterpillar is a necessary stage but becomes unsustainable once its job is done. There is no point in being angry with it and there is no need to worry about defeating it. The task is to focus on building the butterfly, the success of which depends on powerful positive and creative efforts in all aspects of society and alliances built among those engaged in them.

Just as the caterpillar is a necessary stage but becomes unsustainable once its job is done, so is the necessary but unsustainable innocence of childhood. In a world of increasing darkness in which schools and shopping malls are no longer safe places, we might wish to sustain this innocence–if only for a few more years, a few more months.

But the task is to focus on building the butterfly, and the cells of the failing caterpillar give way to the nutritive soup from which the butterfly will emerge. I like to think of childhood as the nutritive soup from which adolescence and then adulthood will develop. And believing this, I can consider Gracyn’s fading childhood as a rich broth that is giving way–moment by moment–to something magnificently more hardy.

And if her transition wobbles on awkward legs for a time, I can take heart in the promise of coming attractions. During spring break of my sophomore year of college, I was at home one morning when a friend of my mother’s and her teenage daughter came for coffee. The woman asked my mom if she could take her daughter upstairs to see our wall of portraits. Actually, most of these were school pictures that ranged from kindergarten pictures to more professional senior photos. As the pair was coming down the stairs to rejoin us, I heard the mother say, “See Kim, I told you these girls were pretty homely in middle school. But they turned out just fine, didn’t they?”

And there you have it: the homeliness present in my sisters’ and my adolescent photos was living proof of the inevitable wobbling towards something more comely and less awkward, the caterpillar yet to become a butterfly. That our homeliness might also serve as the nutritive soup for another struggling adolescence makes our middle school “row of shame” quite bearable.

Author and journalist Teresa Tsalaky writes that Light precedes every transition. Whether at the end of a tunnel, through a crack in the door or the flash of an idea, it is always there, heralding a new beginning. As my granddaughter is about to turn 9 years old (how can it be?), I can celebrate the light of her childhood and anticipate the light that has already begun to herald a new beginning. 

There may be those who wish to expedite transitions, uneasy with their awkwardness and all too eager for what is to come. Not me. I’m all for a season of transitions, for I have smelled Gracyn’s first blossoms, and the fragrance is more alluring than I could have imagined.