Her soul

I believe that all living things have a soul; not necessarily in the strict religious sense but in the sense that there is some universal life essence of which all living things are a part. I believe that some of us are more deeply connected to that essence and have access to more of it than others. Those people are often referred to as "old souls"; I know old souls exist because my daughter is one. (Actually, I think both my kids are old souls, but this time it's about her.) She seems to have an innate grasp of people and of the world and how it works that's far beyond her years.

At the age of two, she contracted an e.coli O157:H7 infection and subsequent Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome and nearly died after kidney failure and going into a coma. She was in the hospital for three weeks - over half of that time in intensive care - but ultimately came out of it all OK. However, one of the aftereffects of a serious e.coli infection can be sterility which won't manifest itself until puberty. But about a year after her hospitalization, she was playing truck-driving mommy (I don't know - it's her invention), and I asked her why she only used two dolls for her children when she had more dolls. She told me that Granpapa - who died when she was 6 months old - had told her while she was having that long sleep in the hospital that she would have two children so that's how many dolls she used.

When she was four, she was run over by our large lawn tractor while Redheaded Spouse was driving it to mow our yard. Her foot and leg were mangled, and we rushed her to our local hospital. There they gave her morphine for the pain and then transported her by ambulance to the Texas Medical Center's pediatric orthopedic center. While in the ambulance, she was accompanied by Redheaded Spouse, who could not stop crying. And our daughter - not hurting much anymore - reached over, took her hand and said, "You don't have to cry that much. I'm not dead, you know." Again, today she's fine although she'll never be able to count past 18 on her fingers and toes. That's Pink Guy's joke, BTW. Her joke is that she tells people her two toes really are lost because although we looked all over the yard we never found them.

She's the little one with the giant heart, the adventurous one, the curious one, the talkative one, the demonstrative one, the bossy one, the determined one, the independent one and the one who seems to just know things. She's the one whose sole remaining grandmother has said that by the time she's 30 she'll either be everyone's hero running the state or in prison for life. And we'll love her, regardless.