Junk Drawer

After the first sleep, we wake up at 4:45am. Luna looks out at the highway from our ninth floor hotel room window and excitedly points out cars as I feel queasy looking down at the distance below. “How about… we sing… twinkle twinkle?” she strings together as we look at the stars. I am taken aback by every sentence, even thought it’s an increasingly common feature of her speech. We run up and down the empty hallways, her Pixar feet padding along as her hips wiggle inefficiently from side to side. If she had a tail it would be wagging. I’m sleepy but happy in this quiet before things get loud. Luna turns two tomorrow.

We meet a reluctant fall in Minneapolis. Blue skies and sun, framed by green leaves. There is some crunch on the ground, but most trees don’t look ready to shed yet. Yellow, orange and magenta flowers flank our walk to the park near my aunt’s house. Reunions and reintroductions go down easy with the promise of a park.

My immediate and extended family have gathered to celebrate my grandma’s 90th birthday, the party for which has serendipitously fallen on Luna’s 2nd. Or deviously, in a plot to lure us back across the ocean. After a sweet morning of my dad’s your-name-spelled-in pancakes, the family gathered to assemble the party. My aunt piles boxes and boxes of tablecloths, serving dishes, hummus and much miscellany into multiple vans which set off for the community centre in Bracket Park. When we arrive, the family gets to work unloading and setting up.

Everyone springs into action, finding a job and getting it done. Setting up tables, filling a cooler with ice and soda. “Decorations, no one has done the decorations!” my aunt announces in organiser exasperation, so a delegate hunts for the box of garlands and streamers and butterflies. My grandma sits regally watching it all unfold.

Slowly the room fills with the people who love my grandma. Some are cousins, second cousins, first cousins once removed. Some are from church or the neighbourhood. Some have white hair and gingerly make their way towards a seat, while some dart between adult legs before finding their way to the foosball table. My sister and brother run a game of Jeopardy that sounds fun from the waves of laugher I overhear while running after Luna. My aunt passes around a song sheet and the room works their way through the songs my grandma sang to my dad, he sang to me and now I sing to Luna. Spontaneous speeches highlight some of the other things that have been passed down through that line. Admiration for other cultures. Relentless positivity. The value of hospitality, of sharing your home and food and time. The importance of hoarding leftovers. Through the tearful reflections of family and strangers, I quietly realise I wouldn’t be who I am without her.

Those of us who don’t live here pack into a restored 1950s rental house in St Paul. Cousins cackle in the kitchen. Parents share gripes in the living room. I, both cousin and parent, float between the generations. Luna whizzes past trailing her new birthday Buzzy Bee behind, recruiting a new relative to play in each room she enters. She sings Chappell Roan and learns everyone’s name, delighting Gate Gamma most of all.

On the last day, some of us sit in the sun in my aunt’s artfully overgrown backyard along with hundreds of real life Buzzy Bees. We look through a photo album featuring every Christmas card my grandparents ever made, starting from the first one with their first born, to the last one with their three grown children starting to have children. It’s uncanny to watch the family evolve through carefully staged Christmas photo shoots. The tiny faces of my aunts and then my dad appear and slowly morph into the recognisable people that became the grown ups that shaped my life. The first Christmas card my parents made after I was born falls out of the back of the album. My first born sits next to me, points at the picture of me and says, “Luna!” That’s what I’m saying, babe.

This bonkers long weekend in the Midwest has been much like Luna’s second year of life. Full of people we love and too short. The first year stretched on and on and I felt so attuned to her every breath. I noticed myself changing as much as she did every day, week and month. Then she couldn’t be the only thing I was attuned to. A singular mission was swapped for a juggling act, and figuring how child and job and family and friends and dinner and exercise and and and fit together. There was less time for everything, and then it was another month. Everyone asks where did the years go and now I too, do not know, and I’ve only got two to search for. It didn’t take too long to flip from the first page of the Christmas album to the last.

When I start to panic about the passing of time and wish I could dig my heels in and wonder if there’s a way to stop the out of control feeling, I think about the things that counteract it. Which is mostly just being present and noticing details. The simplest thing, hardest to summon when things get chaotic.

I note that writing helps me to do these things and I wonder if the feeling of the year evaporating is at all related to the excuses I’ve made to avoid it. I lie to myself about how much time it takes to record an image or a feeling I want to remember so let it be another thing I decide I can’t fit in. But writing opens up a portal, expanding seconds for as long as you want to inhabit them. Re-reading is time travel.

Our flight home is at 10pm and we have our last supper at the Hi-Lo Diner. Ninety years ago Evelyn Reynolds gave birth to Rita Reynolds and two years ago I gave birth to Luna Becker. It’s pretty magical that today they get to sit at the same table and share a plate of fries.