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all new parents started family life in such a mess, or if Joshua had been cheated by the luck of the draw—born with a heart that wasn’t right, into a family that was floundering.
    As we pushed up the hill to the farmhouse, he twisted his head to look at me and gurgled a smile, as if to tell me he wasn’t worried at all. I smiled back and wondered how I could be so in love with something so tiny. He seemed so fragile a vessel to hold all my devotion.
    Grandma was asleep on the swing when we came back to the porch. Our car wasn’t in the driveway, so I knew Ben had gone back to town, probably to hash things out with the phone company, which was probably for the best. Both of us needed some cooling-off time. I wasn’t ready to talk things out with Ben yet, and I figured he probably wasn’t ready to talk to me either. He wasn’t much for talking over problems anyway. He didn’t feel it helped anything.
    I parked Joshua next to Grandma’s swing and watched as he drifted off. Next to Grandma on the swing, a book lay open, and I picked it up as I sat down in the rocking chair beside her. Absently, I turned it over in my hands and looked at the cover. Someone had made it by hand, laminating pressed wildflowers against pretty peach-colored parchment for the cover and binding it in the center with a sky-blue ribbon. The pages inside were blank except for the first few, which I guessed Grandma had just been writing in, because a pen was lying on the arm of her chair. It wasn’t my business to read it, but I looked at the first few words, anyway.
    Yellow Bonnets, it was titled.
    I read on, though I knew I shouldn’t.
    When my mind and body were filled with youth, time barely passed around me. Years, seasons, even days crept by with the sloth of an inchworm. . . .
    I paused and looked at Grandma, knowing I should put down her book. But I turned my eyes to the words anyway. It was hard to imagine her so young. I didn’t know much about her childhood. She never talked about it—almost as if she hadn’t existed before she married my grandfather.
    . . . . and I waited, anxious for them to pass. Summer days were the longest of all, but in many ways the best. The pastures around our old white house bloomed thick with yellow bonnets like a carpet over the bright green grass. And when there was no work to be done in our tilled fields, we children galloped through the yellow bonnets, snorting and tossing our tawny manes like fine horses.
    In my mind’s eye, I can still see our small, bare feet, brown from the summer sun, parting the windswept flowers, scattering grains of pollen to the breeze. We were ever without shoes in the warm months, as our old ones were worn through or outgrown by winter’s end.
    When summer was at its height, the children’s fair would come to town, filling the field beside the church with autos, buggies, and bright gypsy wagons. On Saturday, my father would take five dimes from the coffee tin in Mother’s kitchen and give one to each of us children. Laughing, we clasped our money in our palms and ran along the dusty road to town.
    When we reached the fair, we dashed wide-eyed into the fray. My brothers and sisters spent their money quickly, on candied apples or chances to win popguns and china dolls. I stood back, instead, and thought of how I would get the most for my pennies, for I knew they were precious. Always, I went first to the carousel, where I could ride for half of my dime. When they opened the gate, I rushed forward, looking at one fine horse and the next, white, black, and silver-gray—some wild-eyed with teeth bared, some meek and sweet with heads neatly bowed. With their jeweled harnesses trimmed in gold and silver, they were the finest things I had ever seen, ever touched. In my mind, I can see them yet. When I rode, I threw back my head and closed my eyes, feeling music, feeling wooden muscles gather and stretch beneath my legs. It was magic, and those moments have never left me.
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