Hi Enya, This is lovely. I like very much the way you used a transition "A few years after" to link the last two sentences together. I also like the repetition of patterns in the second to last sentence "Jiya and Kino grow [to be] young men, Setsu grows to [be] a young woman." That kind of conscious repetition is what skilled writers do. I will e-mail you some further comments. Thank you for contributing. Laraine