Winter didn’t hold on as long this year as it had in the past. It was often well into March before the trees turned from brittle looking skeletons with their menacing and bare branches clawing toward the sky into living, budding plants that reminded me of the yearly promise of new life and fresh starts. It was only February and already the town had begun to thaw.
“Good morning, Sunshine,” Nana said one Saturday morning when I came down for breakfast. She’d outdone herself with the smorgasbord of baked goods that lined the old pine table positioned in the center of the kitchen. Cinnamon rolls, country-style potatoes, sausage, thick strips of bacon with ribbon-like curls of fat still clinging to their edges. My stomach growled as though letting its appreciation be known. I plucked a piece of bacon from the top of the pile and snapped it between my teeth.
My hair was split into two braids which hung down my back and I wore pink flannel pajamas that had cotton-tailed bunny rabbits patterned all over them. Nana caught sight of me and cocked her head. Her expression was mixed. There was a little nostalgia there, like she was seeing me as the young girl she’d always known me to be, but there was something more in those twinkling, yet unsure, eyes. There was a hint of goodbye.
I chose to ignore it and stuffed my face with a poppy seed muffin.
“Oh, Mal,” Nana said. “Why have you grown up so quickly?”
Not quickly enough, is what I wanted to reply. Sixteen was a weird age. You weren’t given the benefit of being young enough to make mistakes and merely learn from them anymore, but you weren’t old enough to fully own your decisions, either. You were the legal responsibility of a parent or guardian, but the emotional responsibility of no one but yourself. You weren’t coddled. You weren’t given the benefit of the doubt. You just were.
It was weird that they called those who were ten or eleven in age tweens. We were the tweens. We were the ones caught in between childhood and adulthood. Those prepubescent kids were just stuck between being a little kid and an even bigger little kid.
I wasn’t a kid anymore. I knew what I wanted out of life, and who I wanted to share it with. We’d been together just over four months. That wasn’t a lot in the timeline of life, but my timeline wasn’t all that long yet. The space Heath took up felt huge.
For years, I’d wondered what it would be like to fall in love. What steps I would take to get there, how it would happen and who it would be with.
And then one day I was there. Thrust into the thick of it. I thought I was falling in love with him, like it was some process that happened gradually and methodically. But if I thought on those feelings I had when we first met, they were the same ones I had now. My feelings didn’t change. They just magnified. Exploded.
I’d burst into love with Heath.
I finished chewing my muffin and took a swig of orange juice as I looked at my grandma, feeling like I had the answer to her question, even though it was probably meant to be a rhetorical one anyway.
“You think I’ve grown too quickly? Time is relative, Nana. Sometimes it seems to drag on and then others it feels like it’s not moving at all. Like everything is frozen.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice.” She laughed. She filled up my glass with a pour of fresh squeezed juice. “To freeze time. A fountain of youth, if you will.”
“I don’t know about that.” I smiled and thought of growing old with the boy who’d stolen my heart, of our years together and memories made over a lifetime of love. “I think I just might like to live my life day by day.”
She gave me a pat on my back.
“I think that’s the only way to do it.”
