It’s Queenie’s eighty-fourth birthday. Buuuut, no trumpets this year, no cake collapsing under too many candles. It’s more gentle. Just a soft room, sunlight on her blanket, and my ukulele.

We used to celebrate and roar like the world was ending, hats, laughter, three cakes for good measure. Now the party’s smaller, but maybe closer to the truth. We sang Down Under again and again until the words turned into home. Two Australians, two women, the first and the next, finding each other in a song that still glows, even at the edge of things.

The older I get, the more I think birthdays aren’t about time passing, I wonder if they’re about light returning?

When the people you love can’t meet the world in the way they once did, how do you bring the world to them? What does celebration look like when the confetti has to be invisible?

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