So much changes in a lifetime. And so much stays the same.

Happy one-hundredth birthday to The Horn Book. Prayers and blessings for a hundred more. And because of this milestone, I will start with gratitude for another centenarian.

My beloved’s grandmother, Hilda, lived to be a hundred and seven, dying finally in 2018. I say finally because by then Hilda was long ready to leave this world. She had lived so long, her experiences had become a melodic loop of repeated questions and, since she was nearly deaf, unheard answers.

You have such lovely teeth. Are they yours? This was her question for me. Again and again and again.

By then, she had been a resident of Nightingale nursing home for more than fifteen years. Nightingale, located in the Clapham South neighborhood of London, boasts having “served the Jewish Community since 1840.” The people serving the community were mostly British folks of Caribbean and African descent. Once, while I was visiting Hilda, another resident tried to hand me her used teacup. When I refused to take it, she yelled that I wasn’t doing my job. And though I was confused for a moment, I quickly realized that the resident thought my role was to serve her. Decades before the quiet part was said out loud, this was assumed to be my “Black job.”

* * *

Years before we moved Hilda into Nightingale, we brought her to New York, hoping she’d be able to make a life there among her daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. But she hated New York.

They don’t have my telly, and they don’t have my tea, she complained often. Her telly — who knows. But her tea was a lukewarm cup of Marks & Spencer’s with milk and sugar. Maybe it was the water that made it wrong here in the States. Maybe it was the country itself. But as she sank further and further into a depression, we knew the only right thing was to take her home. Home was different, though. Since she was no longer able to live on her own — she was close to ninety then — we moved her into Nightingale.

Hilda had been a hairdresser, a dancer, a survivor of wars, a mother, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother. At ninety, ninety-five, a hundred, she could still cancan and waltz. By a hundred and one, she began to slow down. Two years later, she no longer knew who we were. But the people around her at Nightingale remained vaguely familiar. The sounds coming from her telly. The taste of her tea.

And always when we visited, at some point in the conversation, she turned to me, saying, You have such lovely teeth. Are they yours?

My son is sixteen now. He remembers Hilda in pieces: her accent, the nursing home, the fact that his beloved grandmother, Hilda’s daughter Veronica, died while visiting Hilda. The shock of this, the heartbreak, lives with us still.

My son has a deep and wide appreciation of music, and when we’re in the car together, he often deejays. When the songs we’re listening to sample songs of my younger years, I make him play the originals. Always, I tell him that the new songs are there because of the old ones — which pisses him off, but am I lying?

[Read Horn Book reviews of the 2024 BGHB Fiction winners.]

And what does any of this have to do with Remember Us? The novel that wouldn’t be in the world without my phenomenal editor, Nancy Paulsen. The novel I am so deeply grateful to be receiving this Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for.

So much changes in a lifetime — whether we live well into our hundreds or move to the next place long before then.

In my own lifetime, I’ve watched the neighborhood I grew up in — the Bushwick section of Brooklyn that features prominently in Remember Us — go from being described as a ghetto, a neighborhood devastated by crack, an underserved neighborhood, the Matchbox, to being referred to as an up-and-coming neighborhood, the place to be, an artist’s haven, the coolest neighborhood in Brooklyn ­— the list goes on. I’ve witnessed the destruction that came with its burning and the destruction that continues with its building. I’ve seen it go from the white flight days of my childhood, when white folks fled the area as Black and Brown folks moved in, to becoming a neighborhood too expensive for working- and middle-class people to afford to live.

Bushwick, like the world around us, does not seem to be, as my character Sage states in the book, evergreen. Just as Sage bears witness to the ways her world is changing, so do each of us. And whether we move into the change with resistance or submission, as we know, it still comes. And yet…

When you turn one hundred in England, the king or queen sends you a card, and then you receive one every year thereafter. The first time Hilda got a card from Queen Elizabeth, she was thrilled. The second time, she was mad because it was the same card. The third time, she said, Who is this from? I don’t believe I know her. Then she moved her weak cup of tea, shaky and spilling over her hand, slowly to her lips. Years later, she was gone.

But she had been here.

She had been here. And my family is better because of her.

As writers, our work is to leave a record so that others coming behind us know someone has been here before. Someone has felt this way. Someone has done this dumb thing or that wise thing. Somebody has cried like this, loved like this, hurt like this, lived…like this. That what you’re feeling inside this ever-changing lifetime is evergreen.

Through the burning and the building, the dancing and the music, the conversations and cards that repeat themselves.

Through the many wars, through the genocides and protests. Through the book burning and book bannings. Through the rights taken and the rights won back and taken again. Through the too much and too little rain. Through the lead-poisoned paint and the lead-poisoned water…and no water. Through Smokey the Bear in the seventies telling us that we can prevent forest fires and California dreaming and burning. This world — as sure as these teeth are mine — keeps on keeping on. And though none of us is evergreen — some small part of what we do, what we say, who we are, stays here.

Some part of us always finds a way back to our tea and our telly. Back to the place we call home.

Some part of us lives on to tell the story.

From the January/February 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. For more on the 2024 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, click on the tag BGHB24. Read more from The Horn Book by and about Jacqueline Woodson.