The grand turned 21 this month. He's an airport barista, making enough but not enough. He was scrawny at birth, and still tips the slender scale. The trip to Alaska's Arctic when he was born is unforgettable.

Much of the country is they say, “unseasonably cold,” this week. There is no such language for Kaktovik, on Barter Island, over 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It's just plain deep freeze in January. 

I can still see the vast treeless frozen tundra blanketed in white, stretching beneath the window of the small commuter plane. I was grandma — coming to help with the kids while our daughter was in Anchorage delivering baby number four. Five, counting the round-faced black-haired girl — just six months old, adopted as an infant straight from the hospital in Barrow. 

The temp never climbed above 20 degrees below the whole two weeks I was there. And that felt balmy after a 50-below wind chill day. No wonder this grand likes his coffee. And likes it hot. 

His bed was a yellow plastic laundry crate — minus the laundry. That's a thing of the past. He's in a tall frame now. The night sound of caribou hooves crunching in the snow out on the tundra mixes with a newborn's wails in my memory.  

He's not got the hair-on-fire red of his older brother; it’s more a strawberry blonde. His brother was in kindergarten when the new baby landed in the small Inupiat village. You could pick that boy out in the class picture — the tropical fruit in the front row. 

Visiting us as an adolescent — his family having moved to Alaska's Kenai Peninsula where moose roam like deer here in North Idaho — our grand was eager to see his first actual doe or buck. I woke at 6 a.m. one day to find him sitting in the wicker rocker, eyes plastered to binoculars, scanning the terrain for a sighting of this exotic creature.  

When the family relocated to Spokane, U High music program was a natural for the teens. Turns out this dude in glasses was pretty good on the trumpet — and even better on the drums. Now that he's 21, maybe he'll score a spot in his dream band.  

He's got a radio voice — a rich deep timbre — and for getting his start in some remote country he's mainly social. I wouldn't call him a butterfly — more a moth if we're going with insects. He likes the nightlife. He's witty; a quick thinker. I'm sure he's everyone's favorite barista. 

He was 11 when we went for a country walk down a gravel road. From nowhere — which always means somewhere — he said he felt like clapping. I said OK, let's clap. We clapped for the trees, and the mountains, and the fields, and the birds, and the blue sky and sunshine. Everything in sight. 

He would absolutely never do that now — his percussion is those drums. But every year when January rolls around, I find myself clapping for that boy.