After Dinner

An evening walk. A neighbor and her granddaughter. The girl's mother was a girl herself when we moved in. We've lived here long enough for the child to become the parent. The little girl wore pink, and she whirled herself around in a circle as she swung a stick over her head. The days they are long for her, and the years, they stretch ahead endlessly.

Meanwhile, the grandmother plants annuals around a tree. She talks softly to the little girl. I couldn't hear what they were saying, only see their heads bowed together in conversation. I inhale a faint whiff of cigar smoke, whether from the girl's grandfather or from recalling my own, I couldn't tell you.

It was that kind of evening, a brilliant sunset in the making, a bank of clouds that looked like a wave eddying around a breakwater, the air still and heavy. The past and present packed together in an after-dinner walk, the most portentous kind of stroll, spilling over with the motions of the day and the dying of the light. The fullness that passes for joy, that is deeper than joy.