I was talking to a friend about our first pregnancies the other day - whether we went into them wanting to have a boy or a girl, whether we found out in advance of the birth, etc - and I got to telling her my own gender reveal story, which just so happens to be the weirdest one I've ever heard of (although if you've got a story that's a contender, please tell me, because I want to read it), and which also ended with me crying in a cafe on Ninth Avenue.

How I found out the sex of my first child: While lying on a table in a Marriott hotel ballroom. In front of about four hundred people. And then I burst into tears.

(...Let me back up. Stay with me; I promise this will make sense - sort of - in a minute.)

This morning, on the walk home from school, my daughter suddenly pointed towards the grass and said "Stop! The orange thing!" I spun around, trying to figure out what she was talking about, and finally saw it: a little orange circle that's part of our backgammon set. She had been playing with it on Friday morning, and I guess she carried it while we walked Indy to school and then dropped it somewhere along the way. It sat there all weekend long, and was still sitting there this morning, waiting to be seen. And my daughter did see it, right away. Not because she was looking "for" anything, or even really "at" anything...she was just looking.

I remember what that felt like, to just look. I miss it so much.

I barely remember anything I learned in the ice-skating classes I took for years and years, but I do remember the precise sound of my blade against the ice, how satisfying it was to hear the scrape build and build and then suddenly go silent when I made a quick stop. When I flip back through my memories like a scrapbook, what pops out at me are moments so small and quiet they almost seem silly: sitting on a dock late at night, watching dots of light on the black water. Laying on the carpet in my grandmother's apartment - a brown one that smelled like dogs - and spinning a big plastic globe around and around on its axis. Standing in a white shower, inhaling the scent of cucumbers and arugula and wishing everything in my life smelled just like that soap.