They happen, and they’re lovely, and they vanish, and we call them nothing because we’re looking past them for the something.

But they were the something.

They were always the something.

I know that now, too late to have known it while I was living them, which is, I suspect, the one universal sorrow, and the reason old people’s eyes go soft and far away when they talk about ordinary days.

Chapter 14 — The Last Day

My last day on Rural Route Four was the second Friday in April, and I did not know until I turned onto the first gravel stretch that morning that they had planned something, though I should have, because it was a road that had learned to see.