I can pinpoint the start of my worrying to fourth grade. I remember one day had a substitute teacher who was tasked with showing the class a video about high rise hotel fire safety. I was always fairly attentive in class, but I couldn’t stop becoming absorbed in this video. I can still summon a picture of the woman recounting how she barely survived a fire in her high rise hotel. I can still recall the instructional portion advising travelers to bring duct tape with them to seal off doors to prevent smoke from entering a room. Most of all, I can remember going home that day and packing a go bag. That bag–a small, cylindrical green duffle I had sewed myself and decorated with an iron on smiley face patch–held some clothes, shoes, a book, and my stuffed animal Mumm. I stored it under my bed, a location I favored because of its proximity to a window I could climb out of and down to safety.

paid the admission and walked forward, enthralled, in a daze like that which most of us hope will spontaneously seize us while traveling. I do not recall signage, but then again I am certain my gaze didn’t seek any signage, trained as it was high above my eye level. I stepped out from the scrubby trees and beyond a few demure remains of walls into a clearing of space and time. I took in a scale of a monument I’d never encountered before: more than a dozen colossal columns, many still bearing the remains of its massive architrave. Even in its state of significant ruin, I felt……

A few years back, my friend Grace told me that when you’re pregnant with a girl, the female foetus already has her eggs, and so in a sense the mothers of daughters carry their own grandchildren. You can’t trust everything your friends tell you, even wonderful friends like Grace, so I looked it up. Sure enough dozens of reputable .orgs confirmed the story.

As the daughter of a mother and the granddaughter of a grandmother, and now a mother of two daughters, I just delight in this concept.

That means I–or the potential of me–sprang into existence as my grandmother danced to the Big Bands.

You know, as a reader I skip descriptive passages about weather. I find most writing about scenery and climate deeply unsatisfying. I pass on movies critics praise for their immersive scenery. No thank you.

I was sitting in our small kitchen—a kitchen with a footprint so tiny you’d think we were in a London flat—on a stool from which I could stretch out an arm and touch any of the four walls. But my arms were busy holding my baby girl. We were nursing, and my phone buzzed with a news alert.

There can be no better means possible to explain my mother to you, for example, than to describe her as a bookcase.

I was the kind of kid adults loved giving journals to. And it wasn’t a bad gift idea: anyone could see how much I loved reading, and so it was assumed that writing wasn’t far behind. Not so gradually a shelf in my bedroom filled with beautiful blank books.

The loveliest writing concept I know looks pretty awful in real life.