See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid

sold old clothes that were fashionable long ago, and other things too: a lamp, a chair, a desk, her typewriter, drinking-water glasses and coffee cups, cast-iron pots, a table with a top made of thickly layered white enamel that had been baked, and many other things, all useful and all had been used by other people who had been alive not so long ago, these things were secondhand, or thirdhand, numerous unknown hands had claimed them before—yes, all that Mrs. Sweet lived with in her Then, had a Then before her; now, she smiled, not to herself, she smiled openly, her fat and wide lips spreading across her face, and to see it would be to see a definition of gladness or a picture of happiness or a person enjoying herself completely; and an afternoon in a winter that had appeared unexpectedly to Mrs. Sweet in the early morning—Then, Now—made her remember the color of the sun’s light, as it shone down on the concrete walls of an empty building which she could see while sitting at her used desk, in her used chair, in front of the used typewriter and trying to see a Then—because there is always a Then to see Now—the light was a soft mauve (though she thought of mauve as a soft purple), like a semiprecious stone (amethyst), like a field of lavender ( L. officinalis ) that had not been harvested … and at the time, then, Mrs. Sweet dissolved in a sweet sadness, for she could not find any more similes for this light that fell on the wall of the empty building and she sat down and wrote a short story about her childhood and it took up no more than three pages, for just then she could only bear the memory of her childhood for that amount of time and space.
    But that morning was just the beginning of that day, and after watching the whizzing by to their purposeful destinations of many of the people who made her life run smoothly (not less difficult), and after experiencing a moment of Then, Now (the memory of being young and living in New York, at 284 Hudson Street, just married to Mr. Sweet, being in love with him, and everything that he knew, because he so well understood the many theories, the theories that made up her Now). And then the adorable, shrieking, panic-causing, irritating cry of the young Heracles reached her ears, not in a winding motion but like the strike of a thunderbolt sent from a god, then came Mr. Sweet and he asked if she could make his breakfast of toast Chernobyl (he liked his toast burnt), a bowl of Cheerios with canned peaches, and a cup of instant Maxwell House coffee with creamless milk. The baby, said Mrs. Sweet to Mr. Sweet. The baby? he answered, and then he said, oh yes, poor Heracles, I had a dream about him last night, and Mrs. Sweet fled to the upstairs of the Shirley Jackson house and found the room in which lay the young Heracles in his little crib, and she picked him up and brought him to her bosom, where the overflowing sacs of milk sat. He drank from them with a ferociousness only possible in a fable, he drank from them as if the future of some great but not-yet-known civilization depended on this act, he drank as if he knew there was a Then and a Now, and a Now from which a Then could would come, time being completely beyond human understanding. And Mrs. Sweet was drained, exhausted, depleted, but how she loved the young Heracles as she looked down on him and he did not know that his life depended on her.

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    Hail the young Heracles, said Mrs. Sweet to herself and then repeated it in a whisper in the ears of her precious son (for he was that, her precious son), and she took him in her arms and kissed him and then tossed him up in the air and caught him firmly and held him aloft and looked into his eyes and they laughed in each other’s face. In his eyes then Mrs. Sweet could see her own self reflected: she was almost as big as an average-sized garden shed, so she told herself, though Mr. Sweet had said to her that she looked like the actor Charles Laughton when he portrayed the