Today the kids and I took a detour home from picking Archie up at school. There’d been an accident in front of the Clock Restaurant, where Wade Hampton and Pleasantburg roads intersect, and the police were detouring traffic around the cars that had been left behind, at least three of them all turned in on themselves and spun around, facing the wrong direction.

Rather than cross that intersection again and drive past Bob Jones University, toward the interstate on-ramp that would see us home, I went out the parking lot behind Archie’s school and turned my car left onto the road there. I drove toward downtown Greenville, but sidestepped the city’s center streets, sticking instead to the roads that would lead to Laurens Road. And as I drove I listened to Archie, Kit and Jack talk.

When we went by Cleveland Park drive, the road that passes by the playground and the zoo, Kit told me she remembered playing down there, on those swings, and she wondered when we could go again to run and jump and climb some more. “Did you know that you could hear the lions and the monkeys from those park toys?” Kit asked me.

Further down the road we passed the bike shop where Archie, Kit and Jack recently picked out their new bicycles, the ones they ride around our cul-de-sac in the afternoons when the weather’s nice, or inside our garage when it’s raining. “Mom, I see our bike store!” Jack sung out from the middle of the backseat. “Oh, wow! I see where we got our bikes!”

Jack laughed a little then and when he was finished Archie echoed his brother’s enthusiasm. “That’s a cool store,” Archie agreed.

I continued driving down the road toward our home, passed the places that populate my children’s memories, and as I listened to Archie, Kit and Jack talk my chest felt full inside. Archie’s birthday is only two weeks away, and I always find myself comparing how much we know now to how much we could only guess at back then, in those final few days before Archie was born.

We were eager to meet our baby, but we were scared, too. He was an ultrasound image then, a fetal echocardiogram, a chromosomal analysis. He was a medical anomaly, one about whom our doctors made predictions and we postulated based on preconditions. We knew we’d love him, this baby of ours, and we believed in his potential, but we wanted to know him, too.

Now we know a little boy who thinks bicycle shops are cool and says as much, and for that we are the luckiest people in the world. We’ve learned about him, and he’s taught us about ourselves, and I don’t know where we’d be without Archie and his open heart and able mind. Six years later on an October afternoon while driving down the road toward our house, toward our home, I can tell you that I decided that this oldest boy of ours is more than we’d ever hoped for, that he’s the prescription for our perspective.