It’s an August midafternoon, which means that in the state I call home the temperature is more than likely in the triple digits and being outside is more than likely to trigger my seasonal wrath. But I am not in the state I call home. 

I am in a state that is more familiar to me than that. Here is where my memory begins, which means as far my consciousness knows, this is where my life began. And here, even a late August midafternoon might have pleasant enough weather to be outside. 

And I am. I sit cross-legged on a trampoline, the frame of which has been in my family longer than I have. My not-quite-two-year-old daughter crouches in front of me, barefoot and a little grubby from playing in the outdoors. We’re splitting open green pods I just picked in my mother’s garden and scraping out the little round peas into our mouths.

This is something I did probably every summer when I was growing up; the flavor is as familiar to me as the color of the sky above us. Something about doing it with my daughter now, here, this mix of old and new, makes it feel like a Moment.

The excessive greenness of my daddy’s lawn and the green of the pea pods; the blue, blue sky reflecting in my daughter’s blue, blue eyes; the white of the big puffy clouds and the white of her puffy little blouse; the softness of the breeze on my skin and the way the tiny peas still taste better than the fat ripe ones; her baby voice saying, “so good!”.

I want to gather up this moment, fold it in lavender and keep it against the days when I can’t feel the meaning and magic in my life, but I don’t have my phone with me to photograph anything and I don’t want to interrupt us to go get it. So I do it the way I’ve always preserved moments, ever since the days when cameras were forbidden fruits. 

I do it with words.