My wife and I moved into our new house last November, so every day until that one-year anniversary is our first time spending that day and time of year in it. You can only have a first once; I try to think about that newness, and make use of the sense of possibility it gives me, before routine sets in.

Every August, there’s a day when it’s unseasonably cool, when there’s an indescribable hint of autumn crispness in the air. I think of those symbols—though perhaps not mere symbols—of fall: spiced apple cider, freshly fried donuts, harvest festivals, visits to farm stores, apple picking, the blue-green mountains out west red and orange for a brief moment. None of it can last; it’s beautiful almost because it’s fleeting, yet recurring. Nature is fickle, but cyclical. The secular markers and rituals of the seasons are like the liturgical calendar of the church; they’re a rebuttal of the notion that time only goes in one direction.

As we reach that age, I think about having kids, and how that opens up a whole new series of “firsts”; how it calls to mind and makes present childhood, like some locked-up, obsolete part of ourselves is opened up again...