Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl

I read somewhere that as an adult you become whomever you were at age 7.  Part of me thinks: scary thought.

The 7 year old I was—always trying to write the longest story in Mrs. Fountain’s class—with the neatest handwriting (we received a grade for penmanship) is not wholly unlike the woman I have become.   I wanted to imitate her perfect script so-o-o-o-o-o bad I probably burned holes in the cursive border that lined our classroom wall.  I was a determined little girl, erasing holes into that thin paper—it was a the color of recycled paper, about as thin as parchment, and lined so that we could keep our upper and lower case letters at a proper height; there was a big empty white space at the top—so we could illustrate whatever we had written about.

On the “quiet side” of the room  Doreen—my twin—was on the “noisy side”…