The Pyramid of Somedays

Margaret sat at her kitchen table, the morning sun streaming through the window she'd washed every Tuesday for forty-seven years. Her orange tabby cat, Barnaby, curled around her ankles, purring like a small engine content with its work.

"Grandma, what's this?" Seven-year-old Lily held up a small wooden structure, fingers sticky with orange juice from the segmented fruit Margaret had peeled for her.

Margaret smiled, her eyes crinkling at the corners. "That, my love, is your father's pyramid."

"A pyramid? Like in Egypt?"

"Not quite." Margaret reached for the wooden blocks, each one painted a different color, edges worn smooth from decades of small hands. "When your father was your age, he built this every single morning. He called it his 'pyramid of somedays.'"

Lily's eyes widened. "Somedays?"

"Someday I'll be a firefighter. Someday I'll have a dog. Someday I'll visit the moon." Margaret's voice grew soft. "He believed if he built it high enough, his somedays would have to find room to happen."

Barnaby chose that moment to leap onto the table, knocking over the pyramid. Blocks scattered everywhere.

Lily gasped. "Grandma! The somedays!"

But Margaret was already laughing, her shoulders shaking with that gentle, rueful laughter of someone who's seen enough of life to know its best jokes. "Oh, sweetheart, that's the thing about somedays. They never arrive in the shape we expect."

She gathered Lily close, smelling of orange and childhood. "Your father never did become a firefighter. He became a paramedic instead. He never went to the moon, but he met someone named Luna in nursing school, and now she's your mother."

Lily considered this, turning the orange segment in her small hands. "So the somedays happened anyway?"

"They always do," Margaret whispered, pressing her cheek against her granddaughter's hair. "Just not how we planned them. That's the wisdom, you see. Life builds its own pyramids."

Barnaby settled back into his spot, satisfied with his contribution. Margaret watched Lily carefully reconstruct the blocks, higher now than before, and thought about all the somedays still waiting to unfold.

Outside, the morning deepened toward afternoon. The orange peels sat curled like small dreams on a plate. And the pyramid rose again, piece by piece, someday by someday.