With B home, we make white beans with Italian sausage and extra garlic. We make chicken stew and spaghetti squash. We make scrambled eggs and English muffins, pork chops with broccoli rabe. After we eat we sit — always our same three seats at the table, always a green napkin for B, brown for C, red for me — and talk. This may be the best moment of family life, of all lives — food eaten, dishes not yet cleared, stories and laughter and enough warm up to have the realest of conversations. In a few days B drives to LA and officially starts her life there. This last lit bit of childhood ritual is grasped and held, found in the post-meal plates still waiting on the table.

January 8, 2015