Quiet Time

WE OFTEN THINK MEMORIES ARE MADE THROUGH GRAND GESTURES.BUT FOR KASSANDRA MONTAG, IT’S THE SIMPLE TASKS THAT RESONATE.

- Kassandra Montag

WIND SCOURED THE MUSEUM grounds. My 4-year-old son kicked the back of my seat as I parked, humming along to the Cars soundtrack. An old-fashioned pink fire truck squatted in front of the museum, an old red hose still wound around the metal reel. My son squealed and reminded me we’d seen a different fire truck “just ’esterday.” We’d actually seen it a week ago, but to him, anything in the past occurred “just ’esterday.”

Wandering past the one-room schoolhouse and homesteader cabin, we paused before an old train. My son pointed out the engine, caboose, and coal car, elaborating on their functions.

In recent months, he’d lost all his baby weight and developed a thinner, more serious face, framed by hair no longer as wispy as corn silk. As we rambled about our house together, nostalgia occasionally hit me—that ache in the gut about time passing, slipping through the neck of the hourglass. I would wonder, “How can I make memories strong enough to capture this emotion?” I’d cup his face in my palms, and his ageless eyes would peer back at me.

I’d brought him to the museum because I wanted to show him something special from my past. When I was in high school, my mother and I were volunteers on an archaeology restoration project at this museum, cleaning dirt from mammoth fossils. She and I did this a couple of times a month over the course of a year, and now, 17 years later, was the first time I’d returned.

Inside the museum, I led my son up to the glass cases displaying the mammoth bones. He wasn’t impressed. He twisted away from me, in the direction of the Model T car.