One Year Loving

This birthday invitation imagines a first birthday held in a tea room, with the small tables pushed into one row and the linen already pressed. The guest list is almost entirely adults: both grandmothers, an aunt who drove in that morning, a neighbor who knitted something and wrapped it in tissue. The menu is cake and lemonade. The lemonade is poured into the good glasses anyway.

The dress comes out of its paper with the smocking still crisp, and it is photographed early, because it will not stay that way. Cake arrives at the high chair, and within a minute there is frosting at the elbow and a pearl strand being quietly moved to the far end of the table. The afternoon ends when the nap says it ends. Everyone stays another ten minutes regardless, passing the baby down the row.