Leave Amelia be

14 is the theme of my week. My son is, my summer camp reunion Facebook page is bringing people and photos back to life from my 14th year, and my work involves an illness that generally arrives unwelcome right around the same time: in fact, my daughter fell ill at 14.

One of my new favorite bloggers named her blog thirteen fourteen. She has the voice that I flatter myself to remember - one that has so much more to say than those in "real" life get to hear. The heart and art of a woman living life directly: before the carapace and the fog of experience.

 When I was 14 I conceived a poetic and fatalistic connection with Amelia Earhart - even though I grew up a few blocks from Emily Dickinson (some day ask me about skinny dipping in her garden), a century apart. I had a thing for willful, underestimated, doomed women who disappear and are searched for forever. I was as confident of that discovery as I was doomed to grey mole status in the endless present of 14. I confess: I don't want them to find Amelia. There are stories we don't need ends for; we all have ends and they aren't the story. It's 14, really, that's the real story. Keeping 14 into one's 90s, if necessary, is what heroines do.

"Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace, The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things." Amelia Earhart

 

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