The Golden Months

When we came back, there was a quality to everything that I struggle to name. An urgency. A refusal to take anything for granted.

Maya started keeping a jar of paper slips on her windowsill. Every time something good happened, she wrote it down and folded it in. By September the jar was full.

The parking lot concert. The darkroom afternoons. The long evenings that extended well past the point where we should have gone home.

We knew, I think, on some level, that we were in something that would one day be over. And that knowledge — far from making us sad — made us pay attention.

I am glad we paid attention.