Courtenay!

We are on Vancouver Island. This will be our westernmost point as we visit the Molitor grandparents.

The ride over was uneventful. Drive, ferry, drive. The ferry ride is always beautiful. Alice completely ignored it and played her heart out in a tiny kid play area, making friends a mile a minute. Beatrice divided her time between playing there and bossing her parents around.

Grandfather Molitor is quite frail now, and very forgetful. Details of his life and ours are clearly quite vague and he does not retain things told to him well. He does love his grandchildren in an utterly delighted and openhanded way that he did not a few years ago. He had always been a stoic and emotionally guarded man, loving deeply but subtly, almost silently. As his intellect fades, though, his heart seems to have come out into the open all the more. He insisted on holding Beatrice; four years ago he was extremely unwilling to hold Alice. I do not believe his affection has changed one whit, but it is a magical thing to see it expressed so openly, so generously.

The children are, as I write, making up for the exhausting, almost nap-free day yesterday. It's two hours past Beatrice's normal waking, and an hour past Alice's. We may have to wake them in order to get to the free hotel breakfast!