Family doesn’t need to be blood-related to be family. They just have to be people who love us. Sometimes those of us who aren’t lucky enough to have blood-related family end up finding people who aren’t related to us but love us just the same.
Katelynn “Katie” Martinez of Fort Collins, Colorado didn’t have grandparents that were close to her.
Her father worked a lot so he wasn’t around that much either. And mom was kept busy in her role as a quasi-single parent. So, Katie was really happy to find that her neighbors were friendly people.
“It was just the three of us. And dad was a truck driver so he was gone most of the time. It could be a lot of stress. My mom was almost like a single mother. On my third birthday we moved to a small house outside of Denver,” Katie explains in a post from Humans of New York. “Next door there lived an older couple named Arlene and Bill, and they started talking to me through the fence. My first memory is Arlene handing me strawberries from her garden. It was a wonderful connection.”
Katie ended up becoming very fond of her neighbors. She began to see them as family. So, she knocked on their door one day and sat in their living room and asked: “Will you guys be my grandparents?”
Arlene and Bill didn’t have any children so they welcomed Katie into their family with open arms and a few happy tears.
They took what Katie felt was a “silly” request very seriously. They created an adoption certificate and hung it on their living room wall to signfiy that Katie had been officially adopted as their granddaughter.
That “Mr. U. R. Special” official signature… so adorable! This adorable certificate was kept hung on their wall until Katie left for college.
Katie would use Bill and Arlene’s home as a “refuge.”
“Bill was the kind of grandfather that always smelled like oil. He taught me to drive everything. He was always fixing stuff. But he’d stop anything to sit down with me and have a glass of tea. Arlene was the type of grandmother that loved crafts, which was perfect for a kid. We were always putting tiny sequins on things,” Katie recalled.
Bill and Arlene taught Katie things, spent time with her, and supported all her dreams and phases. And when Katie didn’t have money to go to college, they still encouraged her to apply.
And when she was accepted they gave her the funds to attend.
“They told me they’d been putting away money since the day I adopted them. Since I’ve become an adult, I’ve learned more about my grandparents,” wrote Katie.
Katie learned that both her grandparents had grown up poor. She also learned that the reason they never had children was because Arlene had struggled with alcoholism. She learned that their lives weren’t as perfect as they seemed when she was peering through the fence.
She also learned how much she truly meant to her adopted grandparents.
“My grandmother passed away in 2013. It was two days before our adoption anniversary. My grandfather gave her eulogy. And at the end, he said: ‘Arlene leaves behind her husband Bill. And the greatest joy of her life– her granddaughter Katie.’”
You can check out Katie’s full post below.
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