Summertime June

Part 1 - The Beginning (Or is it The End?)

Her name was June. June like the summertime sun. When a stranger would pass her by on the street, they'd be instantly reminded of lazy days on the River James and languid nights filled with lightning bugs and happiness. She was a rare creature; no one would realize then just how rare. When she laughed it was as if God Himself had reached down from Heaven just to share one of His secrets with her. There would come a day, not long enough away, when that laugh would be forever extinguished, like when your grandmother tapers the last candle in the dead of night. I'm getting ahead of myself, though. I have to start at the beginning. Her story has to be told by someone who knew her; the lies they tell in the newspapers have circulated all the way to Richmond. Everyone thinks they know what happened to our June, but they weren't really there; I was.

It was late summer in the year 1936. The small Virginia town we lived in had been hit hard by the Depression. There were many who could barely afford to put food on the table for their children. Men ran off and women starved. Everywhere you looked there were the hallmarks of hunger. You wouldn't have known this growing up in my childhood home. My grandfather had grown wealthy off of the tobacco trade, and my father had had the good sense to invest his inheritance in international trade. He told me once that we almost lost everything during the Great War, but by the time I had been born in 1922, he had reestablished our wealth and the family name. My mother, who was as close to an angel as you can get on this side of the sky, would weekly go to distribute food and goods from our farms to the local townspeople. She lived to give to others, until one day she found she no longer had the energy to leave her rooms. That was the beginning of June's story, and I suppose the beginning of mine, too. The doctors my father brought in to treat Mother called her illness "hysteria". To me, it seemed like she had a black swirling cloud surrounding her, sucking the happiness and life from her still young body. I would go to her rooms on the second floor of our home in the late afternoons, hoping each day that she was better. This went on for most of August that year, and my mother must have decided that I needed more companionship than she could give me. So it came to be that in the last week of August when I went up to my mother's rooms for the afternoon, I found that I was not the only visitor she had. A girl about my age was sitting on the chaise lounge in my mother's sitting room, slowly dangling her bare feet from the edge and looking for all the world as if she had belonged there from the day of her birth. At the time, I wouldn't have been able to tell you what struck me so about June, but looking back now I know that it was that ethereal sense of calm before a storm.

Stepping hesitantly into the sitting room, I announced my arrival with a tentative "Hello."

The girl on the chaise lounge turned her head slowly in my direction, and it was then that I first noticed the particular shade of grey in her eyes that made her so unique compared to all of the other girls in our town. They looked storm-cloud grey, the way the sky sometimes looks before a heavy rain. Then, she smiled.

"Hello, my name is June. And you must be Ava." It was a statement, not a question.

She climbed gracefully off of the lounge and walked over to where I had remained standing by my mother's bookcase. She seemed to take me in for a moment, from my unkempt hair (how I hated bows and ribbons) to my lilac-colored dress and white stockinged feet. She smiled again and said with a laugh in her voice,

"You are charming, and we will be best friends." She wrapped both of her arms around me in a hug, and I decided then that we would indeed be best friends; myself and this girl with the grey eyes and the bare feet. I had been a shy child, I would not have told her no even if she had asked, for I did not have many friends at fourteen years old. But, being June, she didn't ask, and I didn't say no.

"Good, you two have met. Ava, your father's hired June's mother to help me take care of the house while I'm ill. You girls will have lessons together in the Fall." my mother's voice was soft and retreating from where she stood in the doorway to her bedroom, watching us. I nodded to my mother, acknowledging that I had heard her speak. She padded quietly back into her bedroom, her steps barely registering against the old hardwood floors.

Everything she did at that time in my life, she did quietly. From the way she breathed to the way she moved in her long silk dressing gown, each choice was calculated to try to keep intact the delicate balance that kept her from sinking into the darkness that surrounded her. In my later years, I would weep for my mother and the loneliness she must have felt. As a fourteen-year-old girl, I wept for my own loneliness. With time, I would learn to allow June into that loneliness, and she would drag me out into a world full of color and light. Still, that's miles ahead in our story. Now that you know how June came into my life, let me take you to the day that we found the secret bridge on Old Church Road, that seemed to be where the trouble itself started.

******* Hi everyone! Thank you for taking the time to read my story! This is the first time I've shared Summertime June publicly, and I am so appreciative of any feedback you all have. This story is a work in progress, so please bear with me while I tell Ava's and June's story in the time that it deserves. I will try to update regularly :). Keep reading for more!*****