A couple of weekends ago I was cleaning out my car. It was filled with Easter grass and chocolate wrappers because Gabe had spilled the entire contents of his basket on the floor while we were driving back from Pennsylvania to visit family, and he had “cleaned it up” but it turns out, not exactly. It had been a semi-stressful car ride for me, with that mess manifesting, as well as the fact that every time I looked in the rear-view mirror to instruct Gabe and Aidy not to eat any more candy, I’d see that their mouths were, yet again, full of jellybeans. They told me that they wouldn’t have any more, they swore it. But they would and they did.

Easter grass is notorious. Not easy to gather once it’s been dumped unceremoniously on the fabric floor of a car, then dispersed and flattened by a week’s worth of soccer cleats and regular shoes landing on top; shuffling feet, antsy. It’s a job for the high-powered vacuum you pay two dollars for at the gas station, which I’d get around to eventually, but for now, I wanted at least a semblance of peace while driving, one that doesn’t occur for me when the car is also a trash can.

I could hear Gabe playing Irish tunes on the piano from inside, the only type of music he’s played for the past two years after becoming fully enchanted with the Irish culture - his culture, by roughly half, more J’s genes than my own - on a trip we took two summers ago. I looked up and saw our roof covered in moss and wondered who you call to remedy that sort of thing, and would they tell us to go ahead and replace it, and for what cost? I thought about how much I enjoy this month. May, with too many end-of-year school concerts and all the excitement before summer rushes in. How we are in the midst of all that, and also, maybe, a constitutional crisis. Those are the places my mind went, and lingered, while I worked on the task at hand. But I couldn’t get all the Easter grass out. It’s impossible, and I’ll find strands years from now, however long this car lasts.

The gift of time, I often tell people - especially other parents - is knowing that it’s all a stage. I agonized over the fact that Nora, now 16 and studying for her AP US History exam (copious notes, tiny handwriting), would nap forever in her baby swing but not in the crib as a newborn, and that now, looking back, those worried weeks don’t even register as emotional memories. I know I felt that way, but I cannot actually feel it again. Dispersed. That I know I’ll carry this white, favorite sweatshirt of Aidy’s - “Paris” in bold letters across the front - from the car to the house again, and again, because she does not (ever) heed my request to bring her belongings in when we arrive in the driveway. And that one day, I won’t remember this in a real way either. The difference is that now I know. Now I know not to agonize in the first place.

No one ever told me that at 47-years-old the repetition inherent in this life we live would have softened me into such a philosophical person.

I came back from a run recently. The kitchen was a mess with pizza boxes and Gabe was making something called Japanese soufflé pancakes, which required, it seems, a lot of bowls. He hadn’t done what I encourage my family to do (incessantly really) which is empty the dishwasher of the clean dishes before dirtying a whole other dishwasher’s worth. And that’s what I thought about first. About this lack in progress despite my entreaties, and all the things that were wrong with that. But is that what you want to see in this moment? To remember? I asked that of myself without prompting, the process finally inherent, habit. The dishwasher? And not the soufflé pancakes, whatever those are, made by your teenage son, impossibly tall suddenly, who wants to be a chef someday? Not the sweet friends of Nora’s who were here last night eating the pizza and watching “Hamilton”, which they decided was a creative form of Friday-night studying for that upcoming AP exam?

A few days later, Aidy and I were walking home from a neighborhood gathering; cheese boards and chips scattered on our friends’ outdoor dining table, a surprise storm, children running from the back yard to the front. Playing “Just Dance” in the living room, muggy with their collective ebullience.

It was close to 10 pm and the streets were quiet; the norm for where we live at such an hour. She was talking a mile a minute, which she tends to do when she’s got my uninterrupted attention on a walk like this. About this spring and her schedule and something her friends did, it’s hard to recall all the details.

And I did it then, the zoning-right-in. The smell of the plants wet from rain and her voice, so cute still. So determined, like the world’s fate depended on the persuasiveness of her commentary.

We rounded the corner on the last street before our own. “Life,” Aidy said, like a realization and a prayer. “Life is so great.” I squeezed her band. That’s exactly what she said.