Nora's seventh birthday

M.’s niece, seven years old this April. Six other children, two parents, two grandparents, three other relatives, a borrowed bouncy castle, a sheet cake.

I keep this kind of note because the small-event archive is its own thing. When you go back through them you do not look for what was important. You look for the texture of the year you spent. Weeks blur. Birthdays do not. When I find Nora’s third birthday, fourth, fifth, lined up under the same parent in the vault, I can see something about the family that the individual entries cannot show.

What I remember from this one: her face when she opened the kit her uncle had picked out (a magnifying glass, three sample-sized rocks, a notebook). That she paused before saying thank you, because she had to take in what it was. That she went outside thirty seconds later and started looking for more rocks. That M. cried a little in the kitchen, because nobody else seemed to notice the small physics of attention happening in front of us.

We left at six. The drive back was quiet in the good way.