The more she grows, the more she reminds me of her. The way she laughs. She's starting to write and somehow she has her mom's y and e. When she does something that reminds her of me, that's when I become startled. When she eats her hamburger like me, flipping the bun around, that's the part that kills. She's our kid. We made her, together. I was lucky enough to have a part of her for such a short period of time, and lucky, again, to have a part of me in such an amazing kid.

When we go to Minnesota it has already snowed, begun snowing. I sit on her grandfather's porch, my ex-father-in-law, and watch her run down the same hill her mom used to at the same age. I watch her sled and build forts and we have snow ball wars and I imagine that she was like that. I imagine my wife, six years old, breaking the top layer of snow, falling down, thigh deep, hip deep, into whiteness, her laughter ringing back from the trees at the back of their property.

The first winter we had together as a family, right after she was born, we came to Minnesota. Her parents watched our kid as she led me through their property, telling me different stories of her, of the land, than the ones she had told me two summers ago there.