Her favorite animal was sea lions. Mine was giraffes. Her favorite movie was Casablanca, which she said was old and black-and-white and very romantic. She tried to tell me what it was about, but it all sounded about as much fun as eating burned bread crusts.

There was a hint of something lingering in her mind. A memory, perhaps, although Jo could only catch the flavor of a few remaining tendrils.

I wished there was a way to keep that in a bottle, that one moment of wonderful perfect, so I could open it up whenever I needed to get a good whiff.

And when thoughts wiggle their way in, sometimes it can be very difficult for them to wiggle out again.

I wondered what getting an A would feel like. The best feeling in the world, probably. Like going to a Yankees game with your dad and eating three hot dogs with extra everything.

Find something you’d want to keep doing forever,” she said, “even if you stink at it. And then if you’re lucky, with lots of practice, then one day you won’t stink so much.

Memory is a curious thing. Some details stick in our minds like peanut butter on crackers, and refuse to budge, as much as we might wish they would. Other memories – heavy ones sometimes, ones that seem unbudgeable – can be plucked right out when we least expect it. Lost memories leave remnants, of course, flavors that linger in the mind, but it’s difficult to taste things when you don’t know they’re there.

And every one of these days, from dawn to dusk, has been more or less the same. Far from grand but not too horrible, either, like a pebble underneath your sock that’s not quite large enough to bother removing.

Sometimes memories hit like a wallop, all of a sudden, and hard. Other times, for no reason that anyone can explain, memories take much longer to sink in. They seem to meander a bit before choosing which mind to settle into.

Well, that’s the thing about knots, isn’t it? If you don’t know the trick, it’s a muddled predicament. But in fact each loop of every knot is carefully placed, one end twisting into the other in a way you might not have expected. I find them rather beautiful, really.