A Smile, A Nod, A Reckoning
He once smiled at me with small brown eyes that had a yellow gleam. He once sat by my child’s bed and read me fairy tales, “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” “The Sugar Plum Tree,” and the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson. In summer he held my six-year-old hand and delighted in taking me with daddy-longlegs steps up the hill to the big lake where we sat on our haunches and watched tadpoles skitter in the shallow water at the edge of the shore. I was his treasured soul—