My fourteen year-old niece recently moved to my neighborhood. She had been living in a suburb of Chicago since she was born. I had helped her celebrate birthdays and attended many of her violin recitals, but I wasn’t very involved in her daily life. I have been looking forward to developing a new kind of relationship now.

I invited her to take a walking tour of her new ‘hood with me. I wanted to show her where you could pick up a good pad thai for carryout and where the hippie candle store is. I wanted to take her to the mom ‘n pop frozen custard shop where, on a nice summer night, lines can stretch out and curl around the corner practically to the library.

For a fourteen year-old kid, she has a lot going on in her life. Within the last few weeks, she moved from the only home she had ever known to a town house in the Lincoln Park area. Confronted with the prospects of settling in to form a new household with her father, his new wife and her daughter represented more than a simple move. (Emma’s mom, my sister, died nine years ago.) Only two weeks earlier, she had major oral surgery and got fitted for braces. And she was about to start a new school within the week. Whitney Young High School. A most urban kind of institution where she would have to take the #9 Ashland Avenue bus most days.

Her new place is a little under a mile away. I planned to walk with her to my place and drive her back home. More than pointing out my favorite pizza parlor, I wanted to show her that I lived nearby, that she could come over to my place any time to watch a movie with me or just to hang out.

When I picked her up, I think she was still figuring out the security system. When I rang her buzzer at the gate, our conversation went something like this: “Do you want to buzz me in?” “No, I’ll just come out.”

As she walked down the stairs, then through the courtyard, I saw that she was wearing a stretchy kind of black sweater with a teal colored knit cap and the biggest smile you could imagine. After a very hot summer in Chicago, it seemed that the weather had changed very quickly. Oh man, I thought, it’s really fall.

We started walking down Lincoln Avenue, past St. Alphonsus Church, where only a few minutes earlier, I had seen a troupe of bagpipers playing to welcome wedding guests. I took a deep breath.

“I love fall,” I said.

“Me too,” she echoed.

While I was thinking crunching through leaves as I walked, less humidity, and football, Emma, I learned, had completely different reasons in mind.

“I love hats and sweaters,” she declared.

I knew by the way her face practically glowed that she loved everything about hats and sweaters; how they looked, how they felt. Shopping for them.

Shopping to me means running to Trader Joe’s to buy party snacks before watching a football game. Emma and I share a special fondness for Johnny Cash, but I know I will probably never be her best partner for an excursion to an outlet mall. And yet, in making her enthusiasm for fall fashion so visible to me, she passed along a little spark of the fire she felt. Being around people who have a passion for something feeds my sense of aliveness, and being around a fourteen year old girl who’s not afraid to flash a glimpse of her braces when she really is taken with something – well, that’s the best.

Loving a girl who loves hats and sweaters in no small thing.