Kindred Spirit

It's amazing, sometimes, to watch the unfolding of children's personalities, and especially to trace family resemblances there. It's more understandable that they have Mommy's eyes, an aunt's long fingers and Grandpa's curly hair, etcetera, even recognizable family temperaments; but likes and dislikes? Or ways of interacting with their world? How is that inherited? And yet it seems to be. It boggles the mind!

Today my five-year-old granddaughter was laughing at the way her sister had positioned a rubber grasshopper, and it occurred to me to show her a real (albeit dead and a bit dilapidated) grasshopper from my son's collection.


She was fascinated.

She looked at it from all angles, and moved on to the butterflies. She asked questions; "Where are the eyes?" "What's that?" She was so interested that I got out a lens and my bright desk lamp. And for the next half hour or more, she pored over my insect collection, with her head bent low over the lens. She moved the insects around to see them top and bottom, always very carefully; she didn't break even one of the tiniest or most delicate. And she insisted on double-checking to make sure she hadn't missed even one.

She even noticed a tiny broken bit of butterfly in the case; "What's that thing?" The coiled proboscis, or siphoning tube, barely 2 mm. across.


And I remembered my early years, how I spent hours watching flies and crabs, investigating the "innards" of fish and sea urchins, permitting mosquitoes to bite me so that I could see how they looked up close. And my delight at my first microscope (at about 11), when Dad had to tell me to calm down and stand with my hands behind my back to tell him about the fly wings I had spent the afternoon looking at.

I had to promise Snookums that I would have more beasties to show her next time she comes so that she would allow me to put these ones away at lunch time.

Astounding! All the more, to me, because most of my other grandkids would be saying, "Ewwww!"

Almost a fish face.