What does hope smell like?

The house smells of baking… My daughter, barely sixteen, sometimes enjoys baking cupcakes, brownies, or the occasional cake. She asks to be taken to the groceries to buy the necessary ingredients and looks up the recipes in her web-enabled phone. Then she spends some time looking at videos, blogging in her secret accounts in Tumblr, which I am not allowed to "follow," and then, when the spirit moves her, she bakes. She bakes whenever she feels like it.

She doesn't bake because I, her father, want a cake. She doesn't bake because her friends expect her to bring cookies to school for them. She doesn't bake because "that's what girls do." She doesn't bake because anyone wants her to do so, but because it makes her happy to bake.

What does hope smell like? It smells of my daughter's baking. It smells of the possibility that I might have raised children who know that your only job in life is to try to be happy, and wish that it should be enough to make others happy, too.

D