"The screen door banged shut behind me and I was eight years old again. The yard smelled of cut grass and the particular sweetness of sun-warmed wood, exactly as it always had. Grandma was in the garden, her wide-brimmed hat casting a circle of shadow, humming something without a name. We sat together on the porch with glasses of lemonade that were always magically refilled. She showed me how to fold a grasshopper from a blade of grass — slowly, deliberately — and I felt time stretch to accommodate the lesson. The afternoon was amber and bottomless. At dusk, fireflies arrived like punctuation. My cousins chased them with mason jars while bats looped silent parabolas overhead. Grandma braided my hair on the porch steps and told me about the constellations, inventing new names for each one. The stars came out. The night air cooled. Nothing was going to change, not for a long, long time."

"纱门在我身后砰地关上，我重新变成了八岁的小孩。院子里崭漫着割草的气息和被阳光晒热的木头特有的甘甜，一如往昔。外婆在花园里，宽边帽投下一圈阴影，哼着一首没有名字的歌。 我们坐在门廈上，手捧柠檬水杆，杆子像有魔法般永远满着。外婆教我用草叶折蚂蚁——缓慢，专注——我感觉时间为了容纳这堂课而悠悠拉长。那个下午是琥珀色的，深不见底。 黄昏时，萤火虫像标点符号般飞来。表兄妹拿着梅森罐追逐它们，蝠蝠在头顶划出无声的抛物线。外婆在门廈台阶上给我编辨子，讲述星座的故事，为每一个发明新名字。星星升起来了。夜风变凉了。一切都不会改变，很久很久都不会。"