The Softening Lens of Hindsight

Hindsight’s supposedly 20/20, but the lens of time only softens the jagged edges of my memories, saturating gray moments and placing them in Technicolor light.

Last week, for instance, I strolled through the aisles of my husband and my outlet grocery store and smiled recalling how my sister-in-law and I used to coordinate our carts so we could stand side-by side and talk while pricing tri-colored couscous, wild rice, and Indian curries.

I also recalled that one December day marking three months since I’d been married, four months since I’d been working in our store, and six months since I’d written a word not included in thank-you-for-the-blender notes. I was standing — price gun in hand — over a green and red bundle of Macy’s Christmas sweaters while contemplating draping myself over them and snotting into the cotton about spending the next fifty years working beneath flickering florescent bulbs.

Then my husband opened the door. He opened the door to my miscellaneous dungeon, adjusted the light bulb so it no longer flickered, and handed me a glass filled with a coffee smoothie that he had made in our apartment. And, quick as a sip, all was well.

The first three years of marriage we spent in that apartment adjacent to our grocery store. As a child my family had lived in a 500 square foot slave quarters set on a 365 acre Civil War-era farm, and my husband had spent his adolescent summers in a camper while his family traveled across the plains tearing down and rebuilding Harvestore silos. So, although we were technically living in the remodeled corner of an 11,000 square foot warehouse, our unique history helped us perceive it for the adventure it was.

But sometimes that adventure wore off, and I longed to look out my kitchen window and see mountains and trees and not concrete and cars. It certainly did not help when Mr. FedEx man mistook our apartment for an office and waltzed right in with his clipboard to sign while I was sitting at the table in my bathrobe eating breakfast, or when a woman came into the living room and looked at the couch set and coffee table as if a twister had just plopped her in Oz. “I thought this . . . this was part of the store,” she’d said, before turning and walking right back out.

I locked our doors after that.

Last week, sitting in a chair in this old apartment while once again tending my child, I recalled those difficult moments with sentimental tears in my eyes. I would not go back to that time if I had that capability, but I did wish that I’d remembered the trying moments were going to pass with the fleetingness of a spring rain, and I would cherish our new home and rolling acreage all the more for having looked out my kitchen window for three years and seen a view of concrete and cars.

Then I glanced down at my precious daughter whose warm breath pattered against my chest and pudgy hands were entwined in my hair. This, too, was fleeting, and I needed to memorize every moment, for two months old would soon become twenty years and looking back through the softening lens of hindsight, the sleepless nights and difficult days would be forgotten, and I would give anything — anything — just for one more second to hold her in my arms.