Do you remember being a little kid and visiting your grandma and papa's house? Whether you were there for minutes, hours, or sometimes even days, they would wait in the window and wave to you as you drove away.
No? Well, maybe I just had the best grandparents in the world.
My grandparents were the ones who waited in the window. Even if we were going to be back just a few hours later, they never stopped waving to us from the window. And they wouldn't just give us a little wave and walk away. They would stand there, together, smiling from ear to ear, waving until we drove far enough away that we couldn't see them anymore. This wasn't just when we were young either.
As the grandchildren grew up, some of us now married, they always waited to wave.
This was something that stuck with me. There are some things in life that for no reason at all just stick with us. Little insurmountable things. Things that always pop up into our minds randomly and frequently. For me, this is one of those things. Except, in this case, I think there is a reason that this has stuck with me all my life.
This small, seemingly insignificant act, was pure unconditional love.
Usually, when thinking about unconditional love, the first thing that comes to mind is a mother or father's love for their child, or maybe spouses' love for each other. Grandparents teach us so much throughout our relationships with them, and we usually give the credit of the lesson of unconditional love solely to our parents, but our grandparents teach us too.
Love cannot be measured or specifically defined, but somehow and someway, I began using whether or not someone waited in the window for me as a yardstick for love. Every time I left my grandparents' house, I knew I would most likely see them again the next day, if not later that very same day.
But they always waited in the window.
In light of current events, most all of us are quarantined due to the coronavirus pandemic. The mandated quarantines happened so fast, that a lot of us had to rush to wherever we decided we were going to call home for the next few months. This left me, and many others, with some quick and hard goodbyes. With these goodbyes, it got me thinking about my grandparents act of love. I would be forced to wave from the window and wouldn't be able to do anything more than that. And unlike my common goodbyes with my grandparents, these weren't just goodbyes for a day, but goodbyes for an eerily unknown amount of time.
But there are some people in life that I just know I'd be dancing around, jumping up and down, and smiling ear to ear, just to be able to wave to them from the window.
So who do you wait in the window for? And do they wait in the window for you?
