“Gifted with happiness — in a way we are not.”

HOME, 9am, in the kitchen. It is the last morning of my sister’s visit, and I’m sitting at the table with my nieces and nephew.

Rosie, Aida, Marius and Lola, I think as I butter toast, are the ordinary-but-magic kind of children that do not want the moon but want what you can give them instead, such as a walk on the beach for example, where they scatter happily to play with spades, like dandelion puffs in the wind.

So sunny, I think, looking around the table, that if you shut them all up in a box in the dark, you’d still see them glow from outside it.