And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

by Fredrik Backman

Isn’t that the best of all life’s ages, an old man thinks as he looks at his grandchild. When a boy is just big enough to know how the world works but still young enough to refuse to accept it. Noah’s feet don’t touch the ground when his legs dangle over the edge of the bench, but his head reaches all the way to space, because he hasn’t been alive long enough to allow anyone to keep his thoughts on Earth.

He often reminds Noah that the universe is over thirteen billion years old. Grandma always used to mutter, “And you’re still in such a hurry to look at it that you never have time to do the dishes.” “Those who hasten to live are in a hurry to miss,”

Their laughter echoes in each other’s chests, and then he says: “I miss all our most ordinary things. Breakfast on the veranda. Weeds in the flower beds.” She takes a breath, then answers: “I miss the dawn. The way it stamped its feet at the end of the water, increasingly frustrated and impatient, until there was no more holding back the sun. The way it sparkled right across the lake, reached the stones by the jetty and came onto land, its warm hands in our garden, pouring gentle light into our house, letting us kick off the covers and start the day. I miss you then, darling sleepy you. Miss you there.” “We lived an extraordinarily ordinary life.” “An ordinarily extraordinary life.”

“How did you fall in love with her?” the boy asks. Grandpa’s hands land with one palm on his own knee and one on the boy’s. “She got lost in my heart, I think. Couldn’t find her way out. Your grandma always had a terrible sense of direction. She could get lost on an escalator.”