When my daughter approached her twelfth birthday, it seemed that she was about to cross over an unknown threshold.  She would soon return to the village of our roots, beside the waters of Georgian Bay, to the home of her maternal grandmother.

There she would pass the four seasons of one full year ... and away from both our home in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia ... and from myself.  For I would soon be, half-way 'round the world, standing between the Israelis and the Syrians; in that no-man's-land called the Golan Heights.

The threshold would not be just temporal, or spatial....  It would be the threshold into personhood.  And so, it is not just one more year, one more birth date gone.  The poem marks the loss of this child from the universal community of childhood....And I wish her well.