“You’re both fighters.”

He wasn’t blind – yet. But he felt as though he should be. Seventy years, but felt much older, somehow.

He squinted out across the lawn – vibrantly green in mid-summer – to the lake, where his little five year-old granddaughter splashed around just offshore, while her mother tried to coax her to practice swimming with a foam board.

‘Kick!’ she was saying – encouraging but clearly exasperated. ‘Ella, hold on and kick your feet!’

‘I have a migraine!’ the girl cried – no doubt in mimicry of her mother. ‘I can’t swim, I have a migraine! I have to lie down!’

He sighed, watching her mother wrestle off her arm floaties. She squealed and ran off towards the lake house.

His daughter, Bonnie, waded out of the water and came towards him, taking a seat on one of the lawn chairs so that they were sitting side by side. He remembered taking her swimming in this same lake house. It was just after he’d returned from the war, and she was their first.

‘You spoil that child,’ he commented. ‘I would have made you stay in the water. That’s why you turned out such a fighter.’

‘I’m not a fighter, Dad. I’m… tired.’

Suddenly, a piercing shriek came from behind them. Bonnie lept up at hearing her daughter’s wail, and turned to see a giant dog – at least 50 pounds – with its jaws clamped around Ella’s arm. Bonnie sprinted towards Ella.

In the hospital emergency room, hours later, he gazed at both of them – Bonnie holding and soothing Ella, who had fallen asleep in Bonnie’s arms waiting to be released from the hospital, a giant bandage covering the length of her little arm – with smaller plasters stuck on various parts of her body, patching up her battle wounds.

‘You’re both fighters,’ he said with a smile.