Sometimes it seems that the list of their worries is endless, that they are corroded by worry, hollow with it—they and everybody else they talk to, these days.

But long too—although sometimes harder to name—is the list of things for which they are grateful: for small mercies, which no longer seem so small. For moments. Like this morning, for Cate, saying good-bye to her husband and her son, knowing they will be there to meet her again this evening, when she returns, knowing there will be food to eat, a table to sit around, the talk of her children. Her husband’s continued steady presence in her life. And for Hannah, the pride she still takes in her work, the fact that she is still friends with the father of her child, the ongoing, unceasing miracle of her daughter’s presence—a love so strong and fierce she feels no loneliness and no need for another, for she has found the love of her life. For Lissa, the quietness of her flat in the early morning, when she gets up early, and feels the warmth of the day to come in the air, and sits in the cool dawn and writes and feels sufficient unto herself.

They are grateful for these things because they know that old age and illness are not, perhaps, so very far away, and are not kind. They have seen this already, understood this, been humbled by it. They are humbled often, these days.

At a certain point in the afternoon, when the two girls have picked at the picnic and eaten their cake and are full of sugar and spiky energy and impatience, they jump up and move away from their mothers and from the other, blond woman they do not know and whose name they will soon forget, onto the grass—called by the sun and the sky and by something else, something within that tells them they must move, right now. The same impulse, perhaps, that calls the seed to push up from the earth and reach for the light.

And Hannah’s daughter takes Cate’s daughter by the hand and they spin round and round, round and round, and the women watch them, caught by their clumsy grace, the assertiveness of their small bodies in space, filled with a joy that is close to—that might, in fact, also be—pain. And the girls whirl on, laughing—glad to be free of the blanket, of the weight of their mothers’ attention, of their mothers’ need for them, of the looping, dipping, hard-to-follow thread of the women’s conversation—giddy with movement, their hands clasped tightly together, round and round, round and round, in this spun-gold moment, dizzy and drunk with life.

Acknowledgments