In your white jumpsuit, you look as small as a rabbit in a pet shop, only more excited than scared, and when I see you standing at the edge of the font, unsure what to do with the locker key coiled around your wrist, you look every one of your eleven years all at once, and innocence sits lightly on your shoulder like the dove that fluttered over Jordan when Jesus himself was baptized, and all I can think is how happy I am that you are happy, that life has not yet hurt you, that you still have so much of life to live. In the font, you grip my arm while I recite the names of women long dead, ancestors who, like you, felt the innocence of girlhood like a meadow, but who soon felt each stone of mortality like a fracture in the bone.
Wow, Scott. This is stunning. Thank you.