Which Cousin Is It?

She was this age when we drove to her house for the Christmas holiday arriving two hours early and just in time for dinner. Her mom was discombobulated because she had expected us by 9pm and had only cooked two pork chops, which could not be spread to feed six adults.

We said, "no problem. We brought wine and sourdough bread. We'll just sit in the Living room and have bread and wine."

Upon arrival, this cousin decided no more dinner for her, so she was released from the high chair and joined us in the living room captivating us with her presence.

We decided to carry out a test of something we had been discussing in the car on the way up.

To begin the test, we switched the places of the Christmas decoration on the lamp table with the one on the long coffee table. In came her mom with the wine, and on auto-pilot switched those decorations right back to their true locations. Too easy we thought.

Next we reversed the location of the two Christmas decorations on the long coffee table, so the candle was now in the middle. Out her mom came with the sliced sour dough bread, and restored the misplaced decorations all in one sweep. We looked at each other and smirked, realizing we had to be much more subtle.

There was a row of five popular magazines on the right side of the coffee table so we reversed the middle one, while keeping them totally aligned and in position, so the title was no longer showing. The next time her mom came to check and see if we were still all right, with no discernible pause, she bent down to fix the titles at the same time starting to say, "Lisa, if you don't stop...."

Her mom was interrupted from carrying out her threat, because we all burst out laughing and told her she definitely got A++ on our test to see if she were the daughter who inherited Papa's close attention to detail that resulted in his national reputation as an excellent diagnostician. I still have an original monograph of his work on fruit orchard spray poisoning.

And the last hint: her sunny smile lighting up her whole face rewarding any adult who came visiting the nightly bath routine, because the bathtub only held the first of eventually eight cousins.