She was also superstitious: she hated jinxing anything with her own expectations. She dreaded disappointment like a disease. It had taken her forever to pick out hers. We’d bought our first laptops together when we were in graduate school. We were historians, counters of years, markers of time, so this spring, twenty years since that day, day of birth, day of death, I opened her computer, to honor the anniversary.

When I was trying to deliver him, my best friend, Jane, was on her deathbed, more than a hundred miles away. Maybe I didn’t want to, I don’t know, I don’t remember. The doctors had to unzip the baby out of me.

We named the bear Elly, for Eleanor Roosevelt, and I carried her around the house in her new fleece suit, practicing. I tried the snowsuit out on a stuffed bear the brown of the bark of a sugar maple. I sewed on little flaps for his tiny hands to be tucked into, like letters into envelopes. (Most of my ideas about parenting came from Marge, fretting beneath her blue beehive.) The zipper ran from the left foot to the right shoulder. Still, wouldn’t he be cold? He was coming out of me: didn’t he need something to go into? I bought a yard of Kermit-green fleece and a matching zipper, and I stitched for him that sort of star-shaped sack Maggie Simpson wears. He wasn’t due till the very beginning of April it would be spring by then, thawed, even blooming. I sewed my first son his first snowsuit when I was pregnant with him, in the middle of a hard and terrible winter, the ramp-up to Y2K, the much anticipated end of the world. I still dream about them-the snowsuits, the little boys. The red-and-yellow brigade of the two-year-olds, the green-and-blue brigade of the four-year-olds. It made the boys look like soldiers from different regiments. Just what I’d have done if I’d sewn them myself. I loved everything about those mail-order snowsuits-the snap-off hoods, the ribbed cuffs-but I especially loved the piping, which ran, as thick as a pipe cleaner, across the yoke of each jacket and down each leg of the pants, like the stripes of a military uniform. The piping on the red snowsuit was yellow, and on the green snowsuit it was blue: fire-engine red, sunflower yellow, summer-grass green, deep-ocean blue, the palette of preschool, the colors in a set of finger paints.

Jill lepore jane