The Longest Shortest Time

She’s Zero!

There’s a group of little girls who live in our building and the surrounding houses that play in the driveway we all share. I call them the Blacktop Gang. Sometimes there are days when the only people I talk to aside from Sasha, my baby, are girls from the Blacktop Gang. The things they tell me are sometimes lies, often absurd, and occasionally I learn more about their families than their parents probably want me to know. The most awesome conversations happen when only one girl is out there with a jump rope or a Pogo stick and she catches my eye, clearly dying to tell me something. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about one of those conversations from a couple months ago, which I had with a 7-year-old we’ll call Katie.

KATIE: How old is baby Sasha?

ME: Eight months.

KATIE: No, but, like, is she one? Or two?

ME: She’s not even one. She turns one in February.

KATIE: [gasping, as if she just dug up an extremely rare fossil] She’s zero!

It feels like so much has happened in this last almost-year. But we’ve only scratched the surface of Sasha’s life. One day she’ll be Katie’s age. And we’ll barely remember those days when we wondered who she was going to be, back when she was zero.