Russian Dolls

However many years anyone may live, let them enjoy them all.

—Ecclesiastes 11:8

My grandma is eighty-two, and I love to look at old photographs of her and my grandpa. She told me that getting old is like carrying all these selves with you. She remembers just how that thirteen-year-old in the picture felt, and how that nineteen-year-old bride felt, and how that thirty-year-old on the back of a motorcycle felt. She said you carry them inside you, collecting them along the way, more and more and more selves inside you with each passing year, like those Russian dolls, nesting within themselves.

The other night I dug out an old photo of Aaron and me. We were at a wedding, right after we had started dating, and you can tell by the way his arm is around me so tightly, by the way I’m huddled into him so closely, that if I could have climbed on to his lap, I would have, that if we could have kissed throughout the entire reception, we would have.

When I look at that photo, I see a girl who was wild about a boy, and a boy who loved that girl right back. It makes me happy to know they’re still in there, still inside us, like Russian dolls.