This morning, Sonora and I went for a long walk. It was still foggy and cold when we started out, but I knew the day would soon warm beyond freezing. We came to a spot in the road where the ice was thin and milky white above nothing. I don't really know why ice freezes in flat sheets above a nearly-dry depression in the ground, but I remembered searching out this easy prey when I was a child. "Step on it." I told Sonora and she walked tentatively forward onto the icy patch. It cracked and fell in with a deep, thin, hollow crunch. She laughed and began stomping all around until the whole thing had fallen to pieces; it looked much like a window pane would have after receiving the same treatment. I laughed with my daughter.

One of the unexpected joys of fatherhood has been rediscovering some of the things I liked as a kid. I had forgotten, until the walk this morning, about hollow ice on dirt roads in the late winter. It made me recall other things like sledding down icy roads on steel-runner sleds, or gently eating the very thin ice that forms in protruding ledges from the snow as it melts, coalesces, and then freezes in a day's time. When I was a child and heard the stories of the Children of Israel, I imagined that manna must somehow be like those thin films of ice that stuck out toward me from the ground, offering themselves up for me to collect and enjoy.

I am glad for the reminders Sonora's discoveries give me that I am still with myself, that every day of me is still in me like a hundred thousand Russian dolls packed into one; it is comforting and somehow wonderful. I wonder which of Sonora's memories, in twenty or thirty years from now, will remind her of this idea, will draw her back to her youth, to walking on a dirt road on a winter day that whispers of spring, breaking up irrational ice.