Sophie’s Question
Aria
The week with Eleanor and James and Sophie staying with us moved faster than I expected.
Not the frantic, crisis-driven fast of the month before, but the ordinary kind of fast that comes from days being full of good things — Eleanor and Margaret deep in restoration projects together, James and David walking the St. Paul site twice and coming back each time with sketches and disagreements that resolved into something better than either had alone, Sophie quietly observing everything with her camera mostly down but her eyes never quite off.
By Thursday I’d stopped thinking of them as guests.
That was the thing nobody warned you about family arriving suddenly — how fast the strangeness wore off and left something that felt like it had always been there, just delayed
