K. who told me all her stories

August 2008

At seven years old, she is the baby of the family, the youngest of fifteen cousins. She has the energy and charisma that come from fighting to keep the attention of a large family on her, the wildest and most serious of all our performers. She is full of awe, glee, affection, horror, delight, wonder, mirth. While the cousins watched a movie inside and the adults talked long past dinner and dusk on the deck, I saw her whirling and leaping around the kitchen, stopping only to scoop a spoonful of ice cream into her mouth.

She is the skinniest kid I have ever seen, with knobby knees and big eyes that smile more than her mouth can, so solemn and hugely unblinking when she was a baby that they worried there might be something wrong with her vision. When she comes back from playing in the surf, she gets so cold (her little legs shaking and her teeth chattering and her hair dripping) that you have to pile sand over her limbs before she stops shivering.

Today she stood on the edge of the stairs with me looking over the ocean. In an urgent fit of seven-year-oldness, she shrieked and gripped my elbow, begging me through giggles not to go away. She has wished for a very long time to sneak into a box of mail and come visit me in San Francisco, she tells me with her fingers fluttering across my arm. I replied that I would love to get her in my mailbox, and she exclaims, "But I couldn't do that! Fifty days in a box, no food?"