There is a specific kind of parent pride that does not know what to do with itself.

It is not the pride of the recital or the report card or the championship game, the kind that has an audience and a clear moment of arrival.It is the other kind.

The kind that sneaks up on you in the middle of an ordinary day.

The kind that you see out of the corner of your eye before it is finished happening.

The kind where you are standing at the kitchen window and you look out and you see your child doing something you did not teach him and did not ask for and could not have planned, and you have to put down what you are holding because your hands are full of something else.

That was the kind of pride Justin gave me all summer.

My name is Lauren Mercer.

I am forty-one years old.

I live in a neighborhood in central Ohio that is the specific kind of neighborhood that was built in the seventies and that has the character of a place that has been lived in long enough to feel like something.The houses are not new.

The trees are large.

The sidewalks have the specific texture of sidewalks that have been there a while and that have cracked in interesting places and that the city has patched imperfectly.

The people who live here have mostly been here for a long time.

Not all of them.

But the ones who have been here the longest have the quality of permanence, the specific quality of people who have decided that this is the place and who have settled into it the way trees settle, rooting down, becoming part of the character of the thing.
Who built things.

Not bridges yet.

But things.

Things that lasted.

Even after the grass grew back.

That was the whole thing.

And it was everything.