This time, I choose a day in early June.

The warm sun feels like a friend, soft and buttery, caressing my shoulders. Soft breezes carry the mingled scents of garden and freshly-mown grass. I’m crazy with joy, drunk with astonishment. I lean closer to one creamy bloom, wishing I could bury my face in it. Gardenia, I sigh. Clean and sensual, pure white with tones of moist earth. I long to take just one bloom back with me. Not allowed.

“Thirty minutes,” the announcement fills my headphones. “Halfway point.” I move steadily through the garden, careful not to touch the exuberant blooms. My ion-propelled slippers keep me just above the ground so that even the dirt path isn’t affected by my presence. I hear birdsong and bee buzz, drinking in every morsel of this lost world.

Sixty years ago I sat in the nearby greenspace, blowing dandelion fuzz, giggling at a bumblebee. I had just taken my first steps. Everything was a miracle then, but even more so now, when it’s all gone. In the distance I see a family carrying a picnic basket, pushing a stroller. I strain to see their beloved faces, but my slippers zoom me away to an empty meadow.

I requested a brief rainstorm for the climax of my visit, and I hold my breath, waiting. The blue sky turns sullen, the clouds blacken, there’s a crack and flash – suddenly I’m drenched. Water in my hair, running down my body, wet clothes clinging. I remember the picnic, Mommy and Daddy holding me up to taste the rain, all of us laughing, exhilarated by this same cloudburst.

A bell rings in my headphones. Time’s up. Within seconds I’m back in the spaceship, with its sleeping cells and well-appointed labs. Those few of us who survived the fires and floods, the toxic air, the blazing heat continue to circle the almost lifeless Earth, hoping to revive the paradise we destroyed. Our clumsy form of time travel can take one person back sixty years or so, to the time Before. Visits are limited to one hour per month.

Next time – snow!