March 9, 2026

The woman walking the other direction gives a bare hint of a smile, a glint of half-hidden joy as she passes my daughter running down the sidewalk, determined little limbs swinging merrily, helmet still on. The woman is still smiling as she passes me a moment later, carrying the scooter my daughter abandoned. She meets my eyes, a flash of amusement in hers, a graceful half nod, keeps walking, wordless.

In that red bike helmet, my daughter always looks to me like a ladybug, usually perched on the child seat behind my husband as he rides, now chasing after her older sister riding on the street in parallel, knotted curly hair in need of a bath and laborious detangling dangling out the bottom of the helmet, the back of a Peppa Pig T-shirt urging her to ‘dream big,’ arms flailing, short legs in tiny blue shorts galloping forward in uneven, zig-zagging strides toward home. The bricks on our sidewalk, only replaced last year by the city, are already uneven in places as tree roots beneath insist on continuing to grow, butting up against the undersides of the new bricks. She thrills at the bumps they create for her to scoot over. After a month of bitter cold, piles of snow that left cars stranded, encased in ice, the temperature soars suddenly, up to 70 today, winter coats still on the hooks and warm enough for, of all things, shorts, this fine weather practically begging for a scoot around the block, up and down the alley.

This is the pace of children growing: last summer they needed me to accompany them, now they don’t. I walk along as much to savor the sweet warmth as to chaperone. When we exit the alley, where the curve of the street looping behind our block dips back up, I assume I’ll have to carry the scooter, walk the bike. “Can you make it up the hill?” I ask. “Mmm, hmm” my older daughter answers no hesitation. “Watch,” she implores as she doubles back to gain momentum before the hard uphill pedal. “I can scoot up the hill!” the younger daughter chimes in, pushing off against the sidewalk sloping steeply toward our street, her legs suddenly muscular and strong, no longer the mere softness of the baby she has always been, the lot of the youngest child, heaving herself up the hill with an effort she wouldn’t have been willing to make last summer, when asking to be carried was always easier, for her, of course, and with the effort it often took to prod her forward, her stubborn nature a match for mine, with the slow pace she determined to keep, often for us. But now keeping up with her sister has overtaken in appeal.

She makes it up the hill, scooting halfway down the block home until her older sister calls out “race ya home,” and she deserts the scooter, calling out the cry of a fictional cat heroine on some TV show we definitely haven’t signed off on, “Bitsy Boots Blastoff!” She takes off on foot toward her sister, running not as a requirement or with effort but with joyful freedom, because her limbs can. That’s when, ladybug helmet and knotted curls, Peppa Pig dreaming big, she passes the smiling woman.

There are bumps in the sidewalk, and trash has spilled in the alley, Styrofoam blocks like cones for an obstacle course, and soon the warm weather will beckon mosquitos, and dinner’s not ready yet, and the list of tasks to complete and problems to resolve is long and glares harshly at me but I don’t see it because I am looking at my ladybug daughter running in her red helmet, and the sun glints perfectly through the still-bare trees, and the birds crowd the smooth, knobby limbs of the neighbor’s crepe myrtle, their cheerful chatter filling the sky as my children glide by, and the roses are ready to prune, the scrappy raspberry bush is budding out, the strawberry patch has survived the winter and may gift us another winter’s worth of jams and though nothing is perfect, in this moment everything is, and I feel the exquisite unfairness of which my bickering children sometimes speak, why do we get all this, this glowing cloud-dotted cerulean sky, this filtered sunlight on a balmy evening, this tree full of birds, this bumpy sidewalk ripe for gleefully scoots, we did nothing to deserve such magic when in other streets bombs have fallen, schools explode, children must run away from harm and not toward the safety of a home they have every expectation of standing, and it does, it isn’t fair, you’re absolutely right children, but here in this perfect evening let us honor the unfair gift we have received with prodigal gratitude, by delighting in the birds, the tree, the light, smiling back at our neighbor as a prayer, running hard with joy not because we must but because we can, we can, we can.