Today is my youngest child's 18th birthday. It feels very odd to have arrived at this milestone . . . to have become the mother of two adults. I'm not sure what to say about the sensation. I'm not so much elegiac as puzzled and also, to tell the truth, tired. Two decades of childrearing suddenly seem like a long, long time.

By this evening, when I'm shivering in the Ellsworth bleachers and worrying about rain and the soccer score, I will have dropped back into the present tense. But for the moment I am existing in a kind of migraine aura, where Past, Present, Future, and Never have amalgamated into a vibrating concoction of history and curious possibility that is also a chill silence. Who would I be without these years behind me?