March 27, 2013

My Girl

I bought her at a flea market years ago and she has survived all the many rounds of stuff purging since then. Look at her.


I mean really look at her. 

I love her the way I loved Scout Finch, Jo March,Nancy Drew, and little Elizabeth Walton. I am jealous that she got to ride her bike on a dirt path through the field.  I imagine her looking at her wrist watch, wiping the mosquito off her cheek, and gunning those pedals because she had to get home before Some O'Clock.  "Would you hurry up??" she winces to the photographer. "I gotta go!"
 

Decades and decades after this summer, there was a daughter, daughter-in-law, or second cousin once removed.  She finds this picture amidst a thousand others in a yellowed cardboard box from the local department store.  She looks at it and tosses it into the "to go" pile without a second look because there is no time for second looks when there are still 8 rooms left to pack up and out.  All by herself, My Girl makes her way into a wooden cheese box filled with a million other black and white  photographs that sits beneath the sign written by the enterprising flea marketer: "Make Your Ancestors!"

And on to my wall, where I look at her every single day. My Girl, my Girl.


6 comments:

  1. this is wonderful, so touching that you took her in and made her your own. she looks like a girl i could have been friends with, a girl i could relate too. thank you for sharing her.

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  2. wonder what it is in her that opens our hearts...are you Linda Anonymous or someone new??.

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    1. i am gaile, but didn't remember how to post under my name.

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  3. julie...i am having trouble posting. but yesterday i said....
    I NOW her...she's ME!
    my bike was my horse.

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  4. Oh, that's even better...I think she's all of us but I don't know what it is that we are seeing.

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  5. Love her! the fox tails, the "tomboy" with a bow in her hair, all her treasures around her neck. I so identify with her sense of purpose. This person was going somewhere. I hope she really did.

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