There is a line in Elizabeth’s Strout’s Lucy by the Sea that twanged my heartstrings like a banjo when I read it. Set in a time of COVID lockdown, Lucy Barton, who escapes to a beach house in Maine with her ex-husband, finds herself pondering the passing of time:

“And thinking of this now made me think ... that there had been a last time – when they were little – that I had picked up the girls. This had often broken my heart, to realise that you never know the last time you pick up a child. Maybe you say ‘Oh, honey, you’re getting too big to be picked up’ or something like that. But then you never pick them up again.”

Illustration: Dionne Gain. Credit:

It’s the most bittersweet wrench – remembering both the joy of those moments, and the fact that you probably don’t remember, or clock, the moments when they passed, when your child last fell asleep in your arms, their forehead burning with fever, or crawled into your bed after a nightmare, or gave you a necklace they made out of pasta shells.

You’d think a bugle should sound or something, doves be released or a cloud of cockatoos squawk in unison to mark such a moment. A military 22-gun salute would be appropriate when you change your last nappy, for example.

I was reminded of this when reading the responses to Charles Blow’s column about the beauty of embracing ageing in The New York Times. Letter writer Kathleen Burns from Wisconsin said she had just spent the day making bugs out of Play-Doh with one of her young grandsons, something she had once done with her now grown daughters. As she sat down that night to take off her sandals, she saw Play-Doh stuck in the tread, and thought of how........

© The Age