I stood in my kitchen at one point and watched my daughter walk up to a plate of cookies and take one and eat it, easily, thoughtlessly, the way a child is supposed to eat a cookie — without checking my face first, without asking permission, without any idea that eating a cookie could ever be anything but a small ordinary joy.

She did not know what that cost.

She is not supposed to know.

That is the entire point.

I thought, watching her, about the version of that same moment a year earlier — the hand over the tray, the reasonable voice, the word big — and about how close the two moments were and how far apart.

The same child, the same cookies, the same season.