How to feel better

We have been reading the Little House books as a family, the first two of them. We have been traveling on the east coast, visiting family and snow. The explicit clarity of the maple sugar snow candy has stuck— ha — with me for my entire life, and I am only now able to try making it with my own children.

Late marriage and childhood is strange, because so much of the repetition compulsion parenting brings is out of step. Am I as old as Pa’s mother, the jigging granny? Probably not, but I’m much older than Caroline and her perfect green dulang.