As Kevin, an unimaginable distance away was having to deal with his meeting between two alien traders, something different had been happening back in his small hometown on earth. These distant events began even before he was taken away and he knew little of what had happened, not having paid attention to the small local newspaper at the time. His timeline and Jenna's will sync up when he manages to return to earth in the near future.

---

"Jenna! Make sure you take the trash out to the dumpsters before you come inside." Her mother's voice called through the open window of the kitchen. Jenna and her mother both liked to listen to the radio together while they worked and the soft music could be heard coming from the little box just inside the window. "We don't want any cats to make a mess again like last time." Her mother continued, amidst the occasional sound of her doing dishes and the soft music.

"Ok mom!" Jenna called to her mother as her dirt-covered hands patted the moist soil around the roots of a transplanted grapevine. "I remember the last time quite well," Jenna whispered to herself as her mind went back to a yard that had been strewn completely with tissues, plastic bags, and used food containers. The whole mess had been a result of Jenna accidentally forgetting to walk the trash all the way to the dumpster at the end of the alley on their block. A nosy cat, probably Ms. Margarette's cat named Pickles, had shredded the side of the black trash bag and set the whole disaster in motion. Pickles was known to be a lazy cat so Jenna suspected that other culprits at work had a hand or a paw in the rest of the trash spread all over the yard and their neighbor's chain-link fence.

She still couldn't figure out how the old pizza box had made its way up into the top branches of the tree in their backyard.

Jenna signed and smiled, patting her slightly muddy hands together. She carefully wiped the sweat away from her forehead with the back of her hand as she looked at her progress for the day. Six of the twelve new grapevines were carefully planted along her first growing line that extended across the center of the backyard. She still had the second row of six holes to dig and vine growing lead lines to hook up before her little vineyard would be complete. She had even painted a little sign and hung it on a nail on the post closest to the house which displayed to the world that this was her little "G & J's Vineyard".

The G stood for Grandpa and the J was for her name.

---

The year before, just after Jenna's tenth birthday, her parents had taken her on a trip to visit some close relatives of her mother in Barolo, Italy. It was there that she got to finally meet her grandfather for the first time and to build up a close relationship with him.

Grandfather Lorenzo was not known to be a very talkative or happy man after his late wife had passed. He had once commented that his life had simply lost any sense of wonder after she was gone. He had simply chosen to withdraw into himself and to spend his days tending his vineyards alone.

All of this changed when his old and faded eyes fell on his granddaughter for the first time. He saw, in young Jenna's wide and expectant eyes as she looked around his old-fashioned villa, the same amazing personality that he had seen in her grandmother ever so long ago. A girl with a beautiful heart. A treasure to be protected and nurtured.

It might have been all the memories that swirled inside his old mind that changed and reenergized his heart, or it may have been the excited hug that he received from the young ten-year-old girl when she recognized him from her mother's photos. Either way, their meeting changed him profoundly.

To the eyes of Jenna's mother and her siblings, his smiles and sudden brightening in his outlook on life was a welcome boon. For years they had all despaired at the slow decline in their beloved father's interest in life. So it was with full hearts and hidden smiles of gratitude when Grandfather Lorenzo had volunteered to show Jenna the vineyard and to teach her all about caring for grapes. Jenna's mom and aunt held their tears in as they watched their father slowly walk with Jenna through the ancient vineyards while telling stories about the history behind it all.

Jenna, just like her Grandmother, had found a special connection with Grandfather Lorenzo. It was his uplifting mix of humor and the unique outlook on living that made him stand out. He loved to see everything with a sense of wonder and this way of looking at things was infectious to Jenna. She wanted to learn how to see things as he did and to find hidden value in the act of creation. He had a talent at teaching that made her feel like she had been around grapevines her whole life. Something about the way he spoke, the passion behind his eyes, and the understanding held in his gnarly old hands allowed him to easily pass on his knowledge to her.

Jenna watched in fascination as his wizened and old hands would inspect and tenderly check the health of each of his vines. He knew by heart the locations of the best and prize bushels of grapes and got to see the wonder in his granddaughter's eyes as he showed how different species of grapes could produce unique traits in the fruit.

Over the two weeks that she got to visit her relatives she found that she loved her grandfather the most. He lived alone after grandma passed away and spent most of his time each day just tending his vineyard. He was too old to travel but her mother promised the both of them that they would all make another trip to see him soon.

These words, mixed with the look of excitement and joy in Jenna's young face, made Grandfather Lorenzo incredibly happy and helped to hold back the sad tears of loss at seeing his granddaughter leave.

At least until the day after she left.

It is moments and meetings like these that can shape the destiny of people and that could slightly alter the course of many lives on the planet.

---

Jenna pushed herself up off of the ground and smiled down at the row of freshly planted vines. Her long dark hair was tied up in a messy knot on top of her head to keep it out of her face and she was sure that her mother would have something to say about it when she went inside. Somehow she had managed to get mud inside her shoe and she could feel it squishing with every step as she walked slowly over to the back porch. After a short session of shaking her shoe out and lamenting at the mud that would be needed to be scrubbed out of the material of her sneakers she finally got around to grabbing the two large sacks of trash. She slung each of the bags over each shoulder before heading down the cement walkway towards the back alley.

Jenna heard her mother trying to close the stiff open window so she called out over her shoulder as she walked. "Mom, can you turn on the lights out here?"

"Ok! I will, and I need to have your father come look at this window again." She said before Jenna got out of range to hear the rest of her mother's low grumbling as she walked towards the garage in the fading light. Their house was old and it had character. Character, yes, and lots of things that always needed to be repaired or slightly adjusted.

Jenna didn't care in the least about the age of their home. It was the life and family that her mother and father created within that meant the most to her. She loved to slide down the old stairs in cardboard boxes with her dad and to learn to cook with her mother every morning. Pancakes and waffles were her favorite. Her father was an artist with his pancakes and could make almost every Disney character out of the shapes and chocolate chips.

Jenna's shoulders were starting to get sore as she rounded the corner of the garage and started to head down the small back service access road to the block's dumpsters near the street.

She rolled her eyes as she could hear her internal dialog telling her that she wouldn't have had to carry so much if she had remembered to take it out yesterday as well. "Yes, yes, I know. But at least now we can send Grandpa a letter with a photo of our little vineyard here." She muttered to herself with a little happy smile. The beginnings of her latest letter was already on her small writing desk up in her room. She had stacks of letters from Grandpa from the past year and she had found a love for writing when she received her first letter from him a couple of weeks after they got back from Italy. Since then she had written so many letters that her mother and father had needed to set up a little stamp allowance for her on top of her chore allowance.

Reading her grandfather's cursive handwriting had been a little bit of a challenge at first, but over time she had come to love the flowing script and even started to try to write that way herself, much to her mother's joy.

After making it down past their neighbor's fence and next to the three tall black plastic dumpsters Jenna finally got the chance to set the heavy bags of trash down.

"Oof! Now to see which one is the empty one today." She said softly as she heard the sound of tires squealing in the distance.

She stood on her tiptoes and lifted the first lid only to find that it was stuffed full of cardboard again for the second time in a row.

"Hmm... looks like someone did move into the neighborhood recently. Dad was right about the boxes." She said before closing the lid and moving on to the next one.

"Eww! Gross! Gag! What the heck is that smell?" Jenna uttered as she covered her nose and mouth with one hand while working to swing the lid back shut as fast as possible.

It smelled as though one of her elderly neighbors had decided to finally dump all of their old and possibly rotten canned foods all in one go. Jenna felt bad for the garbage disposal people and their noses.

The last bin was nearest the street and was thankfully mostly empty of trash. Jenna sighed with relief as she went back and grabbed her first sack of trash. The sack was heavy and she had learned that it was easiest and safest to dispose of if she let centrifugal force and gravity do most of the work for her. She stepped back and began swinging the sack slowly back and forth until it had enough momentum to swing up and into the wide opening of the black bin.

It was pretty dark by now and Jenna was thankful for the light coming from across the street. The library was open and their entrance lights lit up a good section of the road and made it easy for her to see her last trash bag that still needed to go into the bin.

"Looks like it is your turn now." She said as she hefted the bag and began swinging it back and forth. The bag was the heaviest of the two sacks and needed the most energy and concentration to get it up to the right height and into the bin. Jenna was just starting to sweat and to feel her arms getting sore as the sack finally cleared the lip and made its way into the garbage bin.

"Yes!" She celebrated as she stepped closer to the bin on her tiptoes. All she had to do was to get the lid closed and she would be done with her chores.

It was then that she heard another squeal of tires, this time coming from the street next to her. Right on the other side of the trash bin in fact.

She only had a moment to look up and to be blinded by the silhouette of the twin headlights against the side of the dumpster as the corner of the front bumper stuck the backside of the dumpster that she was trying to close. It was just a grazing blow from the car, not really noticeable by the excited teens inside. They didn't even worry about damage to their bumper as they cleared the turn into the small access road and sped down the back streets and off into the darkness.

None of the riders in the car had seen the little girl on the other side of the dumpster or how a grazing blow from a speeding car had sent her flying backward in the darkness.

They didn't even know what they had done.

It was a little over an hour later when her panicked mother and father finally found her. They had been calling her name and had had already searched most of the block together. Jenna had been flung backward into the hard wooden fence and had suffered serious injuries to her spine and the back of her head. She had lain in the gravel with tears flowing, unable to move for the last hour, simply trying to get her voice to work so that she could call for her parents to come to help her.

Nothing worked. She couldn't speak or move her hands. Even blinking was hard and needed to be deliberate. She knew something was very wrong as she listened to the cries of her mother and the heavy breathing of her father as he carried her to their car.

She watched the streetlights speed by as her father drove her to the hospital.

Her future home for many months ahead.