That’s the part that stays with me.

Somewhere in twelve years I had quietly folded away the small involuntary music a person makes when she’s at ease in her own life — humming at the stove, singing half a line while she works — and I had folded it away so slowly that I never noticed it was gone.

My daughters noticed.

They had grown up in a house without that sound and assumed, the way children assume the water they’re raised in is simply how water is, that mothers didn’t sing.

And then we crossed an ocean and I started again, without deciding to, and my nine-year-old and a five-year-old registered it as the biggest change in their entire uprooted lives.