Topic 3: On Losing One's Freckles

Carol:

Childhood’s End
“Summer’s Lease Hath All Too Short A Date” (W. Shakespeare. Sonnet XVIII)

In the summer of 1958, my family moved from our rental home in Brentwood, California to a sprawling California ranch house in the San Fernando Valley. It was a lonely summer as I didn’t know anyone and the lives of the families on Benedict Canyon Road seemed to face inward. Our own house had a driveway that snaked around behind the house and broadened at a two-car garage, plenty of cement for a basketball hoop and enough grass to walk around barefoot. Just about the time I was starting to make some friends in the sixth grade at Dixie Canyon Avenue School, my father was transferred to Canada and it seemed like we spent the rest of the school year getting packed both physically and mentally for an unforeseen move to another country – while my father “batched it” in a large, old company house in Calgary. In a sense I would become an only child as my 18-year old brother would stay behind to start college.

In the summer of 1959, I suddenly found myself in a neighborhood where everything happened outside. Our house sat on almost a half acre with a huge flat front yard and a driveway again led to a wide area in front of the garage perfect for a basketball hoop. It appeared as if once summer hit, every house in the neighborhood released a passel of noisy, happy kids who only came home for meals and bedtime when it finally got dark around 10 p.m. My house became the magnet that attracted those kids for hoop shooting, touch football in the front yard, baseball practice, and even high jumping in the side yard during track season. Sometimes we would split up into teams and head for the lanes behind our houses to collect small, hard crab apples as ammunition to ambush each other—boy, did they hurt.I had always been one of those Campbell Soup kids with big cheeks and a face full of freckles, but in those summers it seemed like even the freckles had freckles. I would later develop a theory that if I got enough of a suntan, they would all melt together (quickly disproven). Our childish adventures would taper off when school started in September. The passel of kids would still pour out of their houses each morning, now loaded with book bags and lunch boxes for the 5-block trudge to our kindergarten-eighth grade Earl Grey School. By December, I would have lost all but the freckles on my nose as the days got shorter and colder.

In the summer of 1962, the games were already beginning to change. We older kids had graduated from Earl Grey and would head off to Central High School in the fall. Suddenly, the younger siblings seemed young and the older ones were, yikes, excited about going to high school in the fall. I mark my move from childhood into adolescence not by the gradual physical changes we were all going through but by a single event from that summer. One evening as we all congregated in my front yard for a touch football game in the fading sunlight, my mother appeared on the front porch and called me in. She led me into the living room for The Talk. No, not the “birds and the bees talk,” the “you’re a young lady now and you have to act like one talk.” No more football on the lawn, no more crab apple fights, no more water balloons. That was the summer I lost my freckles.

Megan & Carol
about 12 years old

Megan:

According to quick and unprofessional Google search, freckles often fade with puberty. So, maybe this topic is meant to be interpreted at a deeper level. I dunno… Mom just burst out of the shower, more excited than I to write her version of this essay. But she has more freckles than I do. So maybe she has more to say.

I can’t remember ever having strong feelings about my freckles. People (mostly my mother) pointed at me sometimes and said, “You have freckles on your nose.” At some point they must have faded, because I have to stick my face right up to the mirror to see through the other blemishes and scars for any trace of extra melanin. Whenever I get that close to a mirror, I inevitably find some new thing on my face – new wrinkles on my forehead, a pore I could stick my finger in, little veins extending from my nostrils. It seems to me that a face is essentially a blank canvas first painted and then etched and carved by the sun. After freckles come pimples, and then lines and wrinkles and veins and then your face falls off and you die. That’s just scientific fact, right there.