Well today I awaken after a night of little sleep saddened by the thought that our German daughter will be gone by this time next week. Katharina lived with us during the 2005-2006 school year and attended a local high school. It took us all about two weeks getting to know each other and we became as close as blood relatives (the ones you still like) and have continued this way for over two years now. She arrived back in the states after finishing high school in her home town of Engelskirchen, Germany on June 21th and has spent the last three months either reading everything there is at the local library on history and world leaders, traveling on Amtrak for thirty days across the country visiting such places as LA, San-Francisco, Chicago, Nigeria Falls on the Canadian side with my brother and sister-in-law, and Providence RI where she met up with my husband while he was there visiting his two daughters from his first marriage. She has seen more of our great land that either Lennie or I.
We must drive her to the airport on Saturday the 20th so she can then begin her nine to twelve month tour of South America with just a few changes of clothing, her traveling companion known to us as a back pack, a few toiletries, her camera, and her journals currently blank but about to me full of amazingly detailed stories of adventures that will reveal themselves day by day and from sunrise to sunset. Katharina is nineteen years old and she cannot imagine living if not able to explore this great Earth from countryside to countryside and from pole to pole.
As she is slowly preparing herself to go, I am saddened to see her leave our home again knowing it will be a couple years before we see her smiling face in person, watch her eat one of her favorite American dinners… spaghetti, watch her play with our dogs or sit beside one of us in the corvette just cruising the town of Spartanburg. She is an amazing young lady full of human kindness and a need to search out things she has only so far been able to just read about. I know in my heart she will be fine, and this trip will open her up to many wonders that you and I have only possibly read or heard about; she will grow in many ways and yet I know she will return the beautiful, bubbly, intelligent, funny, caring young lady that leaves on Saturday. Next Saturday as I cry, the tears will be both joyous and heartbreaking, all for one remarkable young lady that has entered my heart forever.
We must drive her to the airport on Saturday the 20th so she can then begin her nine to twelve month tour of South America with just a few changes of clothing, her traveling companion known to us as a back pack, a few toiletries, her camera, and her journals currently blank but about to me full of amazingly detailed stories of adventures that will reveal themselves day by day and from sunrise to sunset. Katharina is nineteen years old and she cannot imagine living if not able to explore this great Earth from countryside to countryside and from pole to pole.
As she is slowly preparing herself to go, I am saddened to see her leave our home again knowing it will be a couple years before we see her smiling face in person, watch her eat one of her favorite American dinners… spaghetti, watch her play with our dogs or sit beside one of us in the corvette just cruising the town of Spartanburg. She is an amazing young lady full of human kindness and a need to search out things she has only so far been able to just read about. I know in my heart she will be fine, and this trip will open her up to many wonders that you and I have only possibly read or heard about; she will grow in many ways and yet I know she will return the beautiful, bubbly, intelligent, funny, caring young lady that leaves on Saturday. Next Saturday as I cry, the tears will be both joyous and heartbreaking, all for one remarkable young lady that has entered my heart forever.
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