“There’s a word here I don’t know,” she says. “G-N-A-R-L-E-D.”

I pronounce the word for her, explain that the G is silent, and tell her what it means. I tell her to imagine a tree with long and twisted limbs, to imagine the tree in autumn, bare of leaves, stark against the sky. I ask her to put her foot on a bulging knot of bark and hoist herself up into the crooked canopy, the way she did at the park one recent afternoon, until she was too high in the oak, too afraid to descend on her own, resentful that I had coaxed her to climb in the first place, though I knew beforehand of her skittishness in such matters.

Only I don’t say all that, just the part about the twisted branches of an old tree.  I do contort my fingers in the air, though, a gesture my daughter imitates.

“Gnarled,” she says. “That’s a good word because it sounds like what it is.”

We smile, understanding, I think, how some words put down roots.

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It was a rainy Monday, lots of slush and puddles outside, and inside I was recovering from a stomach bug that had knocked me down most of the weekend. Everyone, in fact, was happily low-key and happily indoors—until four o’clock, when Nora had her ballet lesson. I was feeling well enough to take her, and for the first time watched her practice with her teacher the moves she performs at home. Again: the warm sense that my daughter teleported here from another life, that she’s reacquainting herself with old habits.

Back at home, Nicole had prepared an activity with circulars I’d fetched from the supermarket. We’ve been intermittently studying health and digestion these last few months, and now the children would make their own food pyramids. Maddie drew pictures and labeled them; the youngest two (we still call them, sometimes, “the babies,” to which they should, any day, object) snipped pictures of food out of the circulars, glued them to color-coded sheets of paper, which they glued again to form the pyramid shapes.

It was a useful activity, especially when trying to get them to visualize how many pieces of chocolate one should reasonably expect in a day.

After a dinner culled proportionally from the food groups, we flopped down in the living room, and the children watched Puff the Magic Dragon and Nicole wrote emails and I read a chapter of a book I’d studied and admired a long time ago, and the passages held up to the memory I had of them, and I was for once not disappointed in my younger self.

I bother to sketch this day because, if I could, I’d relive it right now. It’s not every day you feel each member of your family has been, if possible, the best version of his or her self, and that you’ve risen to the occasion, and even the weather aligns itself neatly to your household’s shared mood.

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