Like You'd Been There All Along

Dear Ellie,

This weekend, we neglected you so that we wouldn't neglect your nursery.  We went to the Smith House and began work on the walls.  We wanted to paint something that was beautiful and a little bit abstract.  Something that would stick in your mind as one of your earliest memories.  We settled on butterflies that migrate around the room to, and from, a whimsical tree, tossled about by the wind.  The fact that we had 0 manual dexterity when it comes to artwork made this tricky though...  so we conscripted Grandpa and told him what we had in mind.  He sketched the tree from ceiling to floor and then your mother and I did our very, very best to color between the lines.  I'm sure you'll know the tree very, very well by the time you read these letters.

The whole thing was quite nostalgic, actually.  Half my lifetime ago, I was in the same room around the same time of year doing something very similar.  I was 15 years old then, and your mother and I were dating.  Because she'd gone out of town and I missed her, I decided to stick thousands of tiny glow in the dark stars on the ceiling.  I replicated the major constellations, added a dense Milky Way, and then surprised her when she was back in town.  Fifteen years later, most of the stars are still there.  It'll be an odd feeling when you finally leave the hospital and take up residence in that room.  It will feel as though you are nestling in next to our memories, too.  Like you'd somehow been there all along.