An insurrection of chickadees yanked my eyes open very early and I padded downstairs to peer out on the dawn. Morning glory seedlings were straining for the new sun from the windowsill, the sump pump was gushing leftover January out of the basement, and the snow was finally melting over the septic tank — April had sprung open the vault of winter and time ticked forward once again.

A sunny afternoon a few days later found me down in the village, running errands in the lazy manner of a man who no longer needed to pull his collar up and breathe through a scarf. Strolling, I had paused to watch peonies push up through black soil when a spinning flash of red pulled my glance leftwards.

The boy was about six, a rough-and-tumble lad in jeans and a sweatshirt, with his baseball cap on sideways, his sneakers untied, and bravery in his eyes. He sat aboard a flying red tricycle with his feet held out straight in front of him and streamers pouring off the handlebars. Down and down the tiny hill he flew with the vacant pedals spinning wildly and spring roaring in his ears.

He skidded to a stop in twenty feet, his sneakers flinging winter’s sand off the sidewalk, and let out a whoop. Then it was back up the hill and down again. Spinning, roaring, skidding, and whooping. And again.

As the warming sun shone down on this little boy, I couldn’t help but smile. He’d found a moment he loved more than anything and was holding it in both hands. Time was not linear. No clock ticked forward. It was 11:37 on a Saturday morning, and it always would be. Up the hill and down again. Now, forever now.

Grownups have forgotten that clever trick, I thought to myself, and then I remembered that I was a grownup and I looked down at my watch and was annoyed to find it ticking. Forward, ever forward.

So I pulled my baseball cap over sideways, closed my eyes, and imagined.

I imagined that it could be forever now and that a few minutes could last evermore, and if the magic was real, I wondered which minutes I would choose. The obvious ones jumped quick to mind — those days and times we would all pick: the first this, the first that, those turning-point days when life moved, most certainly, this way.

And one of those days rose up above the rest.

It’s 1979 and I am a freshman in college, on my way to earning a degree in forestry from a hands-on school where we students learn about the woods by getting sap on our hands. It’s a Saturday morning and I am part of a work party out in the forest thinning white pine with chainsaws. We rode out on the back of a logging truck and soon we will climb back on for the ride back to campus.

Also in the work party is a beautiful dark-haired girl with big brown eyes who I desperately want to meet. But I’ve never had a real girlfriend and I don’t know how to do it. But I plot and I scheme and hope-beyond-hope I get the timing just right and then there I am, behind her, hopping up onto that load of sweet-smelling pine logs and sitting down right beside her. I can’t look at her, don’t know what to say, and anyway, she is laughing and talking to the boy on the other side, so I just sit there, every fiber in me acutely aware that I am mere inches away from her and then the truck hits a bump and her left knee knocks against my right knee and she turns to me and smiles.

That’s the moment I’d pick — that would be my forever now. And then I’d pick it again. And again. And life would most certainly turn this way and I’d marry the dark haired girl we would be together still.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Her name is Karen and she still smiles at me every day.

First published April, 2009