Frances at dusk
It’s late August, just after sunset, and Frances is watching the Maine coast get dark from the cottage balcony, her head leaned against the railing. She is seven, ten years younger than me; we’d just met that day. She and her little sister (five) had arrived that day, in tow of their parents, their father an old friend of my mom’s college roommate Andrew. The tiny cottage he and his wife, Heather, had rented was full to capacity: them, their sons Alexander (nine) and Elliott (six), my mother, father, me, and my sister. Next door housed Heather’s college friend Molly, and her clan: parents, sister, husband, daughter (five), twin boys (a year and a half, each).
The kids had run circles through the houses all day, multiplying and dividing, combing the rocky beach for sea glass, helping (hardly) with a jigsaw puzzle in the sunroom, eating, wrestling, climbing in and out of laps.
But here’s Frances, serene, looking at the ocean. I sit next to her and ask what’s going on. She looks at me and says sometimes it’s nice to be alone. To not have to look out for her little sister, or do what her parent’s ask. I laugh and say I know what she means. It can be tough to be the older sister.
It wasn’t much of an event, but that night at our hotel (my family kicked out of the cottage because we were four full grown bodies, and there weren’t enough beds) I couldn’t shake that moment from my mind. I was about to start my last year of high school, a few days from my first college interview, but something about this made me really feel like I was finally growing up.
In August of 2010 U.S. estimated that the BP oil spill had leaked 5 million barrels of oil into the water of the gulf coast and only about 800,000 barrels had been captured and contained. A government report stated that only 26% of the oil was still in the water, the rest having “evaporated, dispersed, or been captured and eliminated.” I think this links into my story because it’s about what lingers below the surface, the seen and the unseen, and how sometimes things that should disappear remain and change you.
No responses yet