Anyone visiting centenarian Julia Lobotsky knows to come bearing blueberry muffins. Having been alerted to her limited hearing and mindful of the effects of advanced age on short-term memory, I gingerly enter her room at the assisted living center and justify my presence by displaying a box of them. She is holding court from under a soft blue blanket atop a reclining chair, and the muffins are waved over to the kitchenette. I stack them atop the other boxes filled with baked offerings.

Julia is not a goddess— though if merit and vitality could endow mythic distinction, she would be in the running. At 101 years old, with a blisteringly sharp mind, she’s critical in her initial perception of me. She asks repeatedly why I need more information from her. Did I not, she wonders aloud, do my research on the internet before coming?

I assure her that I did, but my explanations do not register as intended. After ten minutes of fruitless back and forth, during which I internally debate the most polite way to leave, she says impatiently, “I think you just want to know what it was like back then!”

I am relieved. This is the exact information I want. I am not looking for answers to specific questions, though I had prepared a few. I want to be transported to the earlier eras of her life, ushered by the natural flow of her reminiscences. I answer affirmatively, and she’s satisfied. “Why didn’t you just say so?” she asks.

She begins to speak about herself, weaving in and out of the decades of her life, peppering her stories with flecks of information collected along the way. The range is striking—from the history of Dutch settlement along the Hudson River to mothers in Julia’s hometown who were taught to spot enemy aircraft during WWII. She describes the Japanese doctor she met in the 1950s, who bemoaned the emerging generation of short adults due to wartime malnutrition. He was looking for a sizable wife to avoid short children of his own. Time had been on his side: the war ended right as he was assigned to the Kamikaze.

She tells me about the ad hoc research she conducted on the dining service at her assisted living facility, saving grease during the Depression to trade with the butcher, and the superb evacuation plan at Washington’s Dulles International Airport, where she was when the towers were struck on 9/11. These are the stories that make up a life, and the breadth of hers is stunning. I settle in to listen.

*

Julia Lobotsky was born in Rhinebeck, New York, in the summer of 1923. Her mother, Mary, was forced to leave school at thirteen to help support her large family. She worked in a factory embroidering initials onto men’s handkerchiefs. Mary had had a difficult life, though her own mother’s had been even harder. Julia’s Grandmother left her first child in Czechoslovakia to cross the Atlantic and reunite with her first husband, who had emigrated to work on the construction of the New York Central Rail-line. He had saved enough to pay her travel fare, then died from work-related injuries— common in those days, Julia tells me. Her grandmother did not learn of his death until she arrived in America.

Julia’s grandmother married one of the men who delivered the news. He was a friend of her deceased husband, also a railworker, and became Julia’s grandfather. He met a similarly tragic end, though not before Julia’s grandmother bore numerous children. Mary was the eldest from that second marriage.

“This was before contraception,” Julia explained. “So everybody had families of about a dozen. Once they got contraception, the next generation dropped down to about five, and so forth. It was wonderful.” Mary had four children of her own. Julia was her second daughter, followed by two sons.

Mary often spoke of regretting her truncated education, though she was pragmatic about her necessary sacrifice. What troubled her more, however, was the lack of documentation regarding her birth. Julia recalled that Mary frequently searched for information about herself. At the time, no federal laws regulated birth reports. In rural areas, churches kept records. The railroad workers and their families were itinerant, following the advancing construction in caravans. Unfortunately, the church where Mary was likely registered had burned down, and with it the date and month of her birthday. Julia’s family had celebrated it sometime in October, but Mary continued to seek details about her past.

Julia suffered from pneumonia several times in childhood, before the discovery of penicillin. The illnesses left her with permanent lung damage and severe asthma. When she was well enough to attend school, her siblings pulled her the mile and a half to the White Schoolhouse on a sled or a wagon. The teacher recognized Julia’s early aptitude and often had her assist the younger kids with their learning. She fondly remembers the dictionary and large encyclopedia in the back of the classroom, though she was frequently ill and had to remain home.

Julia’s family of six lived on a farm they called ‘Wonderland,’ where they grew asparagus, a difficult crop, among other produce. Her father, John, was a kind-hearted refugee who had escaped Czarist Russia under a wagonload of root vegetables. In addition to farming, he wrote poetry and short stories. Later in life, John would call himself a “revolutionary” and pen political letters to the newspapers. His cousin Peter had emigrated alongside him and helped build the family farm. During WWII, however, Peter returned to Europe to help smuggle Jews to safety. He was caught by the Nazis and burned down along with his operation. Peter was a creative: a self-taught painter whose small, brightly colored family portraits adorn a wall in Julia’s current room.

Autodidacts ran in the family. When Julia had to stay home from school, she would visit the neighboring farm, where Gertrude Bailey and her husband lived. Gertrude had an extensive library with bookcases lining the walls, and she invited Julia to borrow the books, which she eagerly did. She would take a book home one at a time and fill a notebook with every unfamiliar word she came across. The words offered her an opportunity to discover what she did not yet know. In this way, Julia taught herself word by word.

Her health improved, and she attended Rhinebeck Central High School, graduating just months before the Second World War. As valedictorian of her class, she was awarded a Regents scholarship from the state, worth $100 toward further education. At the time, girls who chose college, instead of or before marriage, typically enrolled in 18-month teaching programs. Julia’s parents initially expected her to do the same. But Julia did not want to teach; she wanted to learn. John understood this desire—he was an avid reader as well, gravitating toward biographies and philosophy. Mary was worried and struggled to grasp what it meant for Julia’s future. However, neither parent ever tried to dissuade her from her intellectual pursuits.

As Julia would be the first in her family to attend college, the family sought advice from a Minister in Staatsburg. His daughter, Betty, attended Keuka College, a small liberal arts girls’ school about a four-and-a-half-hour drive west of Wonderland Farm. As Julia tells it, a phone call was made to the school detailing her accomplishments, and off she went. A similar occurrence happened when she sought to further her studies at the University of Rochester. “Things don’t work like that anymore,“ she observes. “But they could if people had faith in each other!”

A theme frequently arises as Julia recounts her life: achievements are not personal accomplishments, but the result of hard work and dedication from others. She likens all science to this collaborative effort, explaining that, “in chemistry and science, you can do things, because... nobody works alone, everyone [stands] on the shoulders of someone else.” She would discuss this topic when invited to give speeches, attributing her successes to teachers and the earlier work of others. Julia would implore listeners to take it upon themselves to help someone else along the way. She suspects and laments that recent generations have become more self-focused and selfish. When she speaks about her education at Keuka College, she remembers the women who supported her there.

First, there was Dr. Flora Marion Lougee, the chemistry professor who “seduced” Julia with science. When Julia arrived at school, she intended to study History, a subject she remains passionate about. However, the History professor, a “nice gentleman,” had nothing new to teach the precocious teenager. There was no future for her in the subject. But Dr. Lougee convinced her that she had a natural talent for chemistry, and Julia soon began assisting her. She remembers that, as seniors, the young women chose to take an optional oral exam given by an outside professor, during which all chemistry subjects were fair game. Nervous but determined to impress Dr. Lougee, the students demonstrated how their beloved teacher taught them to excel.

There was also Ms. Hazel Ellis, the Biology teacher, who had a little cottage on the lake and, on Saturdays, would invite the girls for breakfast and birding. Notably, there was Dr. Katherine Gillett Blyley, an English professor-turned-Dean who became the college's first female president four years after Julia graduated. Katherine made an indelible impression on Julia, who described her multiple times as “magnificent” and “brilliant.” She was a tall woman with a penchant for blue silk dresses and heavy silver jewelry. She called Julia and the other students “her girls,” admonishing them not to sit at home but to go out into the world and make change. “This was not a woman you wanted to let down,” reflects Julia, and notes, without bitterness, that these women would have moved on to big universities or become executives if the opportunities had been available to them. “But that came later,” she adds.

In Julia’s senior yearbook from Keuka, her favorite things at the time are listed as silver, swing, skates, and Dean’s office. Just nineteen years old and in her final year of undergraduate studies, she gazes into the camera through dark, heavy-lidded eyes and a knowing, almost amused smile. Simultaneously, there is something soft about how she wears her youth, and even though 1940s portraiture bathed everyone in a preternatural glow, the camera lends an especially ethereal radiance to Julia’s face. She is described (either by herself or observed by peers) as being Precise—‘Accumulated’—good-humored.

She graduated in 1943 as Salutatorian, magna cum laude, with a dual degree in Chemistry and Biology. Julia joined a fellow graduate at the American Cyanamid Research Laboratories, where she worked for a year as a Microbiology Assistant. The labs were located in Stamford, Connecticut, and the two girls roomed on the ocean with a lovely, but lonely, woman who had taken over her father’s plumbing company. The landlady would serve them cereal and kugel with lemon slices for breakfast before they headed out six days a week to search for another penicillin. For three to four months, Julia searched for compounds that would inhibit bacteria, but soon felt she was stagnating—she had easily mastered the job’s necessary skills. This frustration led to an assignment on a different project within the company, where she tested the half-life of anti-staphylococcus drugs in mice. Just as before, Julia mastered the new skills and realized that these kinds of jobs were “dead-end roads” for her. She did not have the information needed to set up experiments herself. She decided to go back to school.

As before, Julia remembers this transition happening simply. She telephoned a friend who had gone directly to the University of Rochester. This friend then called her mentor, told him about Julia, and he offered her a job and a scholarship. She spent two years at the University of Rochester, culminating in a Master of Science degree in Biology in 1946. Julia shares an anecdote. A unit of twenty WWII conscientious objectors was experimented on at the University by a professor who was interested in the effects of temperature on physiology. In the punishing cold of the Rochester winter, “you’d see [them] in their skivvies on the roof!” A dropped jaw betrays my thoughts, and she clucks, assuring that no one had been seriously hurt, just, perhaps, “uncomfortable”.

Julia was offered a fellowship by Dr. Walter Bloor, the professor and chairman of Biochemistry, whose research focused on the metabolism of fat. In the 1940s, women were not given a stipend for graduate work, and she never considered asking her parents for help. She knew the struggles of farming and felt it was her responsibility to pay her own way. After six years of school and work and a year of research in between, she was exhausted. At Rochester, she had worked daily from eight A.M. to midnight. By the end of the Master's program, money was so tight she would skip dinners the last week of every month. She had no choice but to decline Dr. Bloor’s offer and forgo the opportunity to earn a PhD.

*

Seated on a folding chair next to her bed, we are surrounded by personal effects that have been whittled down over the years: fading pictures, photo gifts from family, bins of clothes, and papers. Julia has lost countless friends and all her contemporaries. She lost the remainder of her immediate family when her brother, John, died at the age of ninety-eight this past summer. They’d been very close, living together in his final years. Julia, in “good humor,” chuckles and recalls how his children had modernized his perfectly decent recliner. The new one was identical, aside from six unlabeled buttons. More than once, she was across the room watching as he pressed the wrong one, slowly ejecting himself from the chair. He would call out each time, alarmed: “Julia, what’s happening?” Julia would tell him not to panic; he was just being slowly lowered down, and then she would call for help.

Along with the characters who have populated various eras, the objects woven into the fabric of one’s life gradually disappear. Even if one can attribute their absence to fate, life span, or a years-long series of practical decisions, the reality is that if someone lives long enough, their lives will shrink to something small enough to fit into a single room.

At least it looks like this on the outside. As tempting as it is for me—sixty years younger than Julia—to assume this external contraction reflects something internal, it just as reasonably stands that experience enriches the soul. Sitting with Julia, I am reminded of how much I like being in the presence of long-distance remembering. No matter the subject or emotional content of the stories she relays, each has a settled quality that demonstrates a deep acceptance within her. It is this acceptance that, so often elusive in the thick of life, offers a balm to its listener. It reminds me that, while one’s beloved effects may fade away, that which hurt them will too.

At midlife, this is still difficult to conceptualize, though I find myself getting closer to imagining it as an inevitability as the years pass. But I still cannot move far beyond the conviction that Julia’s peace is merely a consolation to the mourning and loss ahead. Someday—and this is if I am “lucky”—what is left will no longer be the property of the physical world, but of the mind.

Perhaps that’s why, for many, the threat of developing Alzheimer’s strikes a dark fear within their hearts. People know instinctively that, above all, memories make a person who they are. It is alluring to use this fact to explain Julia’s incredible longevity. When appreciating the sheer quantity of episodic and semantic information she’s clocked in over her life and still has access to, it is easy to see it as a life force. She still seems to know exactly who she is.

*

After graduating from Rochester, a twenty-three-year-old Julia rested for a bit at the family farm, relishing under the comfort of her mother’s nurturing wing. She took a temporary, month-long appointment at a small place near Syracuse, NY, with a man looking to begin research in a former hospital. Julia cleaned and set up lab supplies for him before hearing from a fellow Rochester graduate. Her friend knew a doctor who was setting up a lab in Syracuse. Dr. C.W. “Chuck” Lloyd was brought on by the Obstetrics Department at Syracuse University School of Medicine, and his lab was intended for public service, assisting women with various pregnancy difficulties. According to Julia, Chuck was the first full-time medical doctor to be hired by a university. Previously, medical schools only hired working doctors part-time as lecturers for interns. Julia met with him, was quickly hired, and held her post as a Teaching and Research Assistant for the next sixteen years. Their research centered on reproductive endocrinology, and it was a highly generative relationship for Julia: out of the forty-three scientific articles she co-authored during her career, she worked with Chuck on all but two.

Julia recalls women coming in with miscarriages in the fourth or fifth month of gestation. “We didn’t know anything about how to treat them,” she explains. “Because we didn’t know yet what the hormonal pattern was in pregnancy; that was primarily what the research was about.” She remembers the same women coming in repeatedly—up to nine times—with spontaneous abortions, some confiding that they would love to adopt instead, but their husbands would not allow it. Remnants of disbelief are present in Julia’s voice as she lingers on the thought of the continual suffering the women had to endure.

The lab also tested for ectopic pregnancies. At the time, there was no easy test for this often fatal condition, but if a woman had one-sided pelvic pain and a positive pregnancy test, a doctor could operate and save her life. Pregnancy tests were labor-intensive and difficult to obtain back then, requiring that a woman’s twenty-four-hour urine specimen be injected into a live animal. In Julia’s lab, young female rats were used. If the women’s urine contained what is now called the pregnancy hormone hCG (hormone human chorionic gonadotropin), the dissected rats’ ovaries would be “nice and bright red”. This test, known as the Aschheim–Zondek reaction, was developed in 1920s Berlin and performed on mice or rabbits. Later advancements led to the use of toads, and then eventually to home-test kits made available through new technology in the 1970s. Julia notes that modern testing technology is very simple, but that these advancements take time to develop, underscoring the collaborative nature of the researcher. “Nobody works by themselves!” she reiterates. Because the lab offered this important service seven days a week, only the extremely committed were given jobs. Julia was responsible for hiring the technicians, and if they showed any hesitation about weekend shifts, she would send the applicants away. “You’re wasting our time,” she would tell them.

In 1962, Julia left Syracuse and followed Chuck to the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research Institute in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. The foundation was established in 1944 by two brilliant researchers seeking freedom from the rules and regulations that accompanied University work. According to Julia, the foundation easily secured funds from pharmaceutical companies and the Ford Foundation. It was this hotbed of explorative science that is credited with fueling the advent of the oral contraceptive. Founder Gregory “Goody” Pincus and his lab-partner M.C. Chang had been continuing their “scandalous” work on in vitro fertilization when they were approached at Worcester in 1951 by Planned Parenthood founder and birth-control activist Margaret Sanger. Sanger asked the men to create an oral contraceptive with funding from philanthropist Katherine McCormick. They are widely credited as the fathers of the birth control pill, approved by the FDA in 1960 under the name Enovid.

Two years later, Julia arrived on the scene as a Biochemist. She recalls how the contraceptive studies had been conducted in other countries in order to circumvent U.S. regulations on human testing. Postdoctorates from other countries came to Worcester to be trained in technique, then returned home to conduct the research and send their data back. This workaround continued during Julia’s time as well, and she remembers training international researchers. She speaks glowingly of both Pincus and Chang, recalling her involvement in a noteworthy era of scientific discovery.

Julia received a phone call at work one day informing her that everyone was to meet in the auditorium. The call did not disappoint. Once there, M.C. Chang showed the assembly of researchers the first-ever video footage of an egg breaking the follicle and descending the fallopian tube. Another time, she saw Margaret Sanger, by then an elderly woman, arrive in a limousine, bedecked with jewels.

In her last three years at Worcester, Julia served as the Editor for the newsletter Research In Prostaglandins. During this period, Julia met fellow endocrinology researcher, Dr. Janet McArthur. A brilliant scientist, Janet worked at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and would co-author 129 papers and two books over her long career. The two had a working relationship that evolved into a friendship, and Julia talks warmly about her “wonderful friend.” Julia would work with Janet in the next part of her career as well, though in a different capacity.

After Pincus died suddenly of a rare blood cancer in the late 1960s, money began to dry up at the foundation. Eventually, Julia needed to move again to “secure [her] future”. Though the pharmaceutical companies had begun withdrawing research funding nationwide, public interest in the sciences had begun to skyrocket. “There was no NIH, there was no federal grant money for research...until we went to the moon in ‘69. Then suddenly there was a great interest in science…from the media to the public, and the public to their reps in Congress, and from money to do the research! That’s how it went,” Julia remembers. More funding meant more hiring. In 1973, she was called by the National Institutes of Health to set up an interview. Her first meeting was with a Texan, the temporary head of the Reproductive Unit. The unit consisted of only four or five men. The Texan thought the job, which was administrative, would be better suited to a woman. Julia bristled at his insinuation: “I thought to myself, boy, it’s gonna be a cool day before I come work for you.” But soon afterward, the man was replaced. Julia was called in again. This time, she felt there was compatibility between her and the new head and agreed to the position.

Julia’s official title at the NIH was Biologist; only PhD holders were designated Scientists, but she worked as a Grant Writer. It was the “tremendous amount of writing” itself that drew her to the job, as she had always loved to write. Her department was within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), and she worked directly with researchers, assisting them with their funding proposals. Her laboratory experience was essential to her effectiveness. Julia surmised that because her male colleagues had gone straight from school to government work, they did not appreciate the lab’s reliance on funds. Julia says they were lax about labs, took advantage of a loophole that doubled their funding, and did not care that this stole from other important research. Julia was not having this. By identifying the issue, she helped fund thirteen more labs in the first year alone. Her boss came to rely on her, but her co-workers’ regard soured; Julia’s own work performance put theirs to shame.

It was unpleasant being the only woman dealing with the Grant Committee. Julia was required to attend the meetings, though she was not allowed to speak beyond introducing herself. As such, the men ignored her, and she was appalled by their unchecked behavior. “I never heard such swearing and lousy language in my life...I didn’t understand how terrible people could be, how cruel! With no women on the committee...they would just make all sorts of nasty remarks.” She remembers a particularly cruel song they would sing about a woman from Galveston. The meetings upset Julia terribly. Fortunately, the dynamic changed dramatically when a woman from California was added to the committee, reining in the men’s behavior.

Over Julia’s decades-long tenure at the NICHD, she served on six different task forces, including one on nutrition and another on genetics. She was a member of the Ovarian Workshop Committee. She recalls working on grants awarded to Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris for her breast cancer research. She remembers how Shyamala, Vice President Kamala Harris’s mother, would come into work on Saturdays with her two young daughters in tow. Julia assisted her good friend from Harvard, Janet McArthur, in securing funds for her own research. At that time, Julia and Janet were two of about a dozen female members of The Endocrine Society—the oldest group of its kind and a leader in the field of hormonal research. The women were frustrated that they did not receive recognition for their contributions and were excluded from key roles within The Society. At a session in 1976, Janet gave a presentation mocking the low representation. This session led to the formation of a group, Women in Endocrinology. Rosalyn Yalow was elected the Society's first female president in 1978. Julia is proud but practical about the group’s accomplishments. “It shows you what women can do if they organize and figure out how to do it!” she says forcefully. “And you can do it; you can do more than you think!” She continues, “We need to get more women into government, into the congresses of the states, so they can look out for women, because evidently the men...are not going to stand up for what they know they need to do.”

Respect for Julia in her field was widespread. In 1990, she was awarded The Endocrine Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award, which praised her “tireless efforts in support of biomedical research” and her “unending empathy for investigators”. That same year, she received the Society for the Study of Reproduction (SSR) Distinguished Service Award, “given to recognize ‘unselfish service’”. The chair of the SSR awards committee described Julia as:

An advocate, messenger, and advisor to many of us, [who] receives no personal recognition for our successes other than her own satisfaction in the knowledge that her efforts have advanced the field of reproductive biology” and noted that it was “her experience in the research laboratory [that] provided her with a strong commitment to excellence and the advancement of research...which has benefitted numerous members of the Society and reproductive biology as a whole.

Julia practiced what she preaches. She contributed directly to the body of scientific research and supported others in her grant-writing role while they built on that research.

In 1995, Julia was asked by the president of Keuka College to serve on the Board of Trustees. She was at first perplexed by the offer, having no real knowledge of undergraduate education. But at the first meeting, she saw that there were few women and that the majority of trustees had neglected the Board's fiscal responsibility. These were businessmen from nearby areas. “They put this on their letterhead, you know, ’trustee’...[but for them it was] just a big club. They were just having a good time.” She felt compelled to serve, and the board benefitted from her sharp eye for nine years. Julia was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Keuka when she delivered the commencement address a few years later.

After twenty-five years of service and a difficult battle with colon cancer, Julia officially retired from the NIH in 1998 at the age of seventy-five. She was not ready to quit the pursuit of science, however. In her last week of work, she phoned the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. and expressed interest in teaching. The following Monday, she began holding half-hour classes called “The History of Science in America” at the museum's Hands-On Science Center, often for children on school field trips. Julia was sometimes frustrated by the teachers’ disinterest, which she found was then mirrored by the children. Yet, when she incorporated tactile and participatory elements into the experiments, she saw curiosity sparked among visitors. For this reason, she was disheartened by the profit-driven changes she observed during her time there, which steered the museum away from its educational purpose. Even so, she enjoyed the work and was sorry when she had to give it up thirteen years later, finding that the subway commute had finally become too exhausting.

*

Julia’s voice becomes fainter as the hours pass by, and it is the only way I can ascertain that a large amount of time has elapsed. Aside from glancing over her belongings, my attention has stayed fixed on her face, animated and bright even at her age. She retains a sardonic humor, and when she smiles, it is wide and luminous. In essence, she is beguiling. I imagine she always has been. Though she insists that she’s not too tired to continue, my conscience tells me otherwise. I do not depart satiated by her stories; instead, I find it difficult to pull away and say goodbye. I could sit listening for hours more.

During our initial misunderstanding, I wondered what it felt like to attend college when everyone else was getting married, about the misogyny she must have faced in a male-dominated field. Seeing her life through my own feminist lens, I told her I was there because I was so impressed by all she had done and the rare life she had lived as a woman. She’d balked at this representation, telling me, “Life just happens. You don’t choose it...things happen!” I had felt both shamed and puzzled by her resistance. Why did I see rebellion in her life choices, where she only saw pragmatism or fate? Still, she did not explicitly share what drew her into the field of reproductive endocrinology over all the other areas of science. Without her answer and despite her resistance, I can only draw inferences and see her as an unsung feminist hero in the historic struggle for parity between the sexes.

Whether or not she positions herself within a feminist framework, Julia has championed countless women and devoted nearly all of her adult life to expanding our understanding of the female hormonal system. The field of biomedical research has been unequal from its inception, with male bodies standing in as the norm. Women were excluded from clinical trials because of their “hormonal fluctuations”, leading them to be perceived as too unreliable for study. The NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, which came towards the end of Julia’s career, required that any NIH-funded research include women and minorities. However, the earlier exclusion resulted in a massive lack of information that continues to cause a gender gap in care today.

To achieve equality between the sexes, care and respect must be afforded to all bodies. Without people like Julia working tirelessly to prove the unique differences and needs of the female body, the NIH law and others like it might never have existed. It would be impossible to calculate how many lives have been improved or saved as a result of Julia’s contributions. In my futile attempt to grasp the enormity of this causality, I can only think of the butterfly effect and imagine the millions of ripples that this single researcher’s wings have set in motion. As Julia has reminded me all afternoon, her work was made possible only through the contributions of those who came before her.

Despite the serious implications of her life’s work, Julia gives me a deceptively simple answer when I ask her why she chose to go into science: “Because you follow what you dream...what you want comes along, and it’s fun. Am I going to do something for [my] life’s work that isn’t fun?” I want more from her response. I want to understand what impelled this brilliant woman to work as long and hard as she did. Perhaps this reflects a generational difference in how we think about our lives. But given her age, she has earned the right to speak with authority.

I reflect again on the gift of distance, both simplifying and profound. The prospect of sharing my perspective when I am closer to Julia’s age flickers in my mind for a few seconds. But I also know that I have much to do in the meantime. She assures me she will eat the muffins later. I say goodbye and slip out the door.