Last week my father by Ruth Caswell Smith

Last week my father fell on his gravel driveway. My daughter found him unconscious, bruised, and bleeding. At sixteen, she is outgrowing her adolescent awkwardness, gaining agility, strength, and beauty. My father, at eighty-nine, is gradually losing those very same things. When she told me what had happened, it occurred to me that I’m stranded between the two of them, impossibly far from my teenage years, hurtling towards old age, and able only to observe the joy of my daughter’s transition, the loss of my father’s, and the struggle of both.