That means "I love you."

I met her when I was five.

She stood out to me, even as a child, because she was the only adult at the family reunion playing football with the cousins.

"This behavior!" gasped the relatives. "At the age of 82!"

She sent me letters, real mail, type-written on yellow stationery bordered with flowers. We drove to Minnesota to visit one summer, staying with her in her tiny house. We spent days swimming in the pool and exploring the surrounding gardens and lakes. She swam laps every morning. It kept her young, she said.

Before we went to sleep at night, she would reach over and take my hand, squeezing it three times.

"That means 'I love you,'" she explained. "My husband and I used to do that every night before we went to sleep. It was my secret with him, and now it's my secret with you."

I didn't see her much, but there were letters, always letters. I wrote back religiously, even learning to type on the electric typewriter that my parents kept in the basement. Then she got sick. She moved from her tiny house into a tinier room in a nursing home. The nurses continued to read her my letters, and I still received them from her, sporadically now, even as the cancer progressed, eventually forcing her into a wheelchair and then into bed.

She died when I was fourteen. Weeks later, I received a package. It contained her wedding ring, and several smudged photos of me. When I looked more closely, I saw that the smears on the photos where the places where she'd kissed the images, to say goodnight, or perhaps good morning, or just as a way to tell me she loved me, since I was too far away to squeeze her hand.

Her ring sat in a safety deposit box for years. Now, I wear it on a chain around my neck. It reminds me to hope. It reminds me that somewhere in me runs the blood of the woman who swam laps to stay young, and played football with the cousins, and loved unconditionally and well.