In Transition

It's going to harder and harder now to stay inside, to pretend to be an adult making money, pulling my economic weight. I am blaming solely the close sunshine, the air laden with the odor of blooming dogwoods and the yellow pollen. The cool, green grass subtracts years off my age back to about twelve, when I was still rolling around in it and clothing myself in it and in the meantime discovering womanhood.

The dogwoods remind me of it especially. They smell like menstration when fully bloomed, just like I did. I wore white jean shorts that day. Some boys I didn't know pointed at my crotch and cackled at me when I walked to my mom's car after school let out. But I only found out when I got home and went to the toilet. I told my mom I had chocolate in my underwear, but when I showed her she gave me the ultimatum.

"That's your period," she said, after deliberating then smiling like she'd discovered a lost secret, "You're becoming a woman."

The words tugged at my chest, as if someone was taking something away from me against my will.

"I don't want to be a woman," I said, and I cried for an hour, burying myself in the blankets on my mother's bed.

Later I walked out the front door into the summer heat of the South that can't accurately be called air. Down the road lived a horse named Lobo, whose owner had told me I could come brush it and pet it whenever I wanted. My size 5 Nikes took me straight to Lobo's gate, and I cried for awhile longer, explaining my newfound crisis to him and wiping my face on his mane.

When I saw in his silver-dollar brown eyes that he understood, I patted him and walked to the old Civil War graveyard overrun with ivy and anthills across the street. It was the only place in the neighborhood - the only place in town, I was certain - where you could get a cool breeze on a 92 degree day. In the summer, the atmosphere of the graveyard was damp and mossy, calming and reticent. It was only in autumn, nearing Halloween, that the neighborhood kids payed any attention to it and it became somehow ominous and creepy.

Of that day it's all I can recall. I'm sure I walked back home, ate supper with my family, returned to business as usual, as much as a little girl can with blood leaking from her vagina for the first time in her life.

The dogwoods, the tiny white flowers clustered, turning pink with bleeding edges as they age, will fall off and lay their backs on the hard brown earth in a few weeks. Spring seems to be the most short lived of the seasons, the adolescent season of transition. But it's the most florid and langourous, when things rise with new life and shed a bittersweet husk.