Grow

Until the beginning of spring in my seventeenth year, those were my mornings. With each passing season, I entered the kitchen a little taller and she smiled at me with a few more wrinkles on her face and a few more grey hairs on her head. Though the days were good and bad by their own merits, and though our home otherwise had the usual coming and going of rough patches and petty spats, there was one ritual that remained sacred. My comfortable but simple life, lacking in sleepovers with close friends or trips to faraway places, was easy to take for granted.