And at the bottom was a name. A woman’s name I hadn’t thought about in fifty years. Margaret. My grandmother’s best friend. She lived two doors down from us when I was a kid. I remember her coming over for coffee, sitting on the porch with my grandmother, laughing. She moved away in the late sixties and we lost touch.

I sat there on the kitchen floor for a long time. I’m not sure how long. I held that note in my hand and thought about Margaret. She must be in her nineties now, if she’s still alive. And she remembered that one night in September when my grandmother hummed that tune and said she’d sing it to her babies. That meant me. She was singing it to me before I was even born. And Margaret held onto it for sixty years.

Every single box on my shelf was her way of saying we remember. I never figured it out because I only asked people in my own little circle. I never thought to ask the old lady two houses down from when I was six.

I still haven’t called her. I’m not sure I know what to say. But I pulled out the old phone book my aunt left me and I looked up Margaret’s last name. She’s still in the county. I’ve got the number on a sticky note next to my coffee maker.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to wind that lullaby box one more time and I’m going to call her. Right now I’m just sitting here in the quiet, with twenty little boxes on the shelf, feeling like somebody has been watching over my birthdays my whole life.

That lullaby is inside my head now, and it’s not going anywhere.

I sat there on the kitchen floor a while longer and let that tune play in my head again.

I remember exactly how my grandmother’s voice sounded when she sang it. It was high and thin but soft, and she’d pat my back with her hand as I drifted off. Her hand was always warm. She smelled like lavender soap and coffee. That was sixty years ago, and it still comes back clear as anything.

I remember once I asked her what the song meant. She just laughed and said, “It means the moon is tucking the baby in for the night. Nothing more to it.” She never told me where she learned it. But it was hers and mine. And I guess it was Margaret’s too.