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. To: katie@dundee.net
From: sarah@sarahspage.com
Date: 7-7
Subject: The End of the World as I Know It?

Katie,

I’m very sad tonight and very confused. I know you must be really sad too, so if reading this is going to totally bum you out — don’t. I understand.

I can’t believe I made such a fuss about missing THE BEACH and having to come out here for THE SUMMER — that I was so intense over losing the house. I was acting like my WHOLE WORLD had gone away. And the only way I know that it HADN’T then is that it HAS now.

What am I going to do? My whole life has changed. It’s really been changed for weeks now, only I didn’t know it. Though I probably DID know it, deep down. And whatever happens, things will be different. That is the absolute WORST thing. No matter what I do, things won’t be the same. There isn’t any choice that lets things be the same.

I’m going to miss you so much. I’m going to miss laughing in English class and being confused together in Trig. Sharing stuff to put in our lockers. Trading dessert at lunch. Swapping bestsellers instead of doing homework. Thinking of weird ways to wear our uniforms. Making up stupid names for the teachers. And EVERYTHING ELSE. I can’t even list all the things I will miss. The apartment, school, friends, summers. Everything about every day of my life will be different. There’s not enough stuff in the world to replace all the stuff I will lose.

I’m so numb I can’t cry. I can’t make sense of anything. All I can think is "What am I going to do?" I can’t ever imagine being happy again.

Ellie is lying next to me. She’s giving me a look like, "At least you’ve got me." That makes me cry a little. The love of a STUPID animal. At least that doesn’t change.

What am I going to do, Katie? Are you feeling the same way? It’s SO HARD to find a best friend. Some people NEVER do it. And you and I almost didn’t see that we should be friends. Remember that? I don’t want to lose my best friend. Is there any way that won’t happen?

So I know you’re going to say — of course we’ll be friends. We’ll see each other. We just won’t be going to school together. ANYBODY would say that. I want it to MEAN something. Things change. People drift away. So don’t SAY it unless you MEAN it.

I’m sorry. I don’t mean to yell at you. It’s not your fault my family’s so screwed up. I suppose I should be mad at Mom and Dad, but I can’t do that either. Maybe it’s this total loyal daughter thing. Or maybe it’s that I knew they did everything because of me. I don’t know.

I feel like I have to shut up now. And maybe stay shut up for a few days. Write if you can.

s


. To: katie@dundee.net
From: sarah@sarahspage.com
Date: 7-9
Subject: Flora & Fawn-a

Katie,

I know I haven’t written for days. I really appreciate you still e-mailing me. And I REALLY appreciate your not telling me what you think I should do. I don’t know yet. I really don’t. I’m going to talk about something else.

Maybe it was lucky things worked out this way. But like the day after I last wrote you, Jeff was looking at the weather map and it showed that in about 4 days it was going to MONSOON and not stop for a week. That meant the first cutting had to be like NOW.

Problem was, he’s on this special team at the hospital that rotates to other places. So for this week he had to haul his butt 2 hours away. He expected to have the evenings free to do the hay thing. But now he didn’t.

So that meant Amy and I were on call. That’s the lucky part. Because let me tell you, cutting hay absolutely ABSORBS your attention. Amy can drive a pretty mean tractor — so we were all set with that. But being totally maimed physically and now emotionally, there was some discussion about whether or not I could hold up my end.

Weird, you know. I was like, LET ME DO IT. And I WANT TO DO THE HAY. Nothing could have kept me away. I think it’s because I REALLY needed something to do.

So here’s how it works: it’s been really dry, hot weather, so the timing is perfect. We’d get up, have our coffee, and wait for the dew to burn off. I’d keep occupied and keep from thinking by doing my chores with Traverse. ("Chores" is a real farmer word that I’m starting to use.) Then we went out to do the cutting. It took us the whole day to cut because the tractor is really old. Amy was the grim reaper on the tractor and I was the scout. This means that she has to (1) drive (2) keep her rows straight. I have to (1) keep looking forward to make sure she doesn’t run over a big rock or a stump or anything (2) keep looking backward to make sure her blades haven’t been hung up on anything weird, like some old piece of wire or something.

I call her the grim reaper because as far as the little critters (yes, another farmer word, "critters") in the field are concerned, that’s exactly what she is. In front of the tractor you can just see the grasshoppers jumping every which way as she approaches. Like, "Oh MY GOD! It’s ARMAGEDDON!" Then as you look behind, they’re all hopping around on the now-totally-bald field going "MY WORLD! It’s DESTROYED." And I’m like, "Yeah, guys. I know how it feels."

The sad part is that sometimes the non-bug critters bite it too. There’s the occasional field mouse or even small bunny that can’t get out of the way fast enough. I know there isn’t any choice and all — like what are we going to do, cut each blade of grass with a scissors? But it’s all too close to that whole cat thing. I’m all into Ellie murdering mice when they’re in the HOUSE and stuff. Still — on the tractor I felt like an invading army going into their homeland and just pillaging.

There was this one thing that happened that is hard to believe. There’s a spot in the field that’s kind of marshy. Amy says it’s really wet in spring. But we were pretty sure it was dry now. Only thing is we didn’t want to be proved wrong by watching Jeff’s tractor go GLUG GLUG and disappear into the mud. So Amy asks me if I wouldn’t mind walking ahead and making sure the ground was firm.

Now, there are a lot of reasons that a week ago I would have said NO WAY. Reason #1 — I don’t want to go Glug Glug and disappear EITHER. Reason #2 — SNAKES!!!!! But somehow, this week I don’t care whether I get sucked under by quicksand or bitten by a snake. There’s a big part of me that really hopes I do.

So in I went. I started to thrash around and stomp here and there — the grass was up to my shoulders — when I stepped on something soft and heard this loud "WAHHHHHHHHH!"

Well I’ve pretty much decided that when you step on something soft in Michigan it’s probably an animal, so I jump back about a hundred feet. Then I wave at Amy to STOP. So I look down, and there is this TINY little fawn, all snuggled up and LOOKING at me with these big deer eyes. It was SO TINY. Like Ellie is like twice as big as this thing was.

So Amy comes running over.

"Oh My GOD!" she says. "That fawn was just born maybe hours ago."

"How can you tell?"

"It can’t get up."

"So the mother deer just LEFT it here?" Animals have this way of doing things that are so COLD sometimes. And you can’t be mad because they’re animals and that’s just the way life is. But there are times when you just want to call Animal Social Services or something.

"Well, yeah. But it’s not like it sounds. When fawns are born they have no scent. So the mother will leave the baby in the high grass. Nothing can sniff it out. No wild animals can find it unless they literally stumble over it."

"Like me."

"Yeah. So it seems like this little one is abandoned, but the mama is around here somewhere. Let’s not touch her."

Just when Amy said that, Ellie, who’d found us and started sniffing around, goes up to the baby and licks its nose.

And I get this overwhelming sense of — "BAMBI!"

We shooed her away, of course.

"Okay," says Amy, "back to work. We’ll just cut very gently around her little world here. She should be able to get up in a few hours. So tonight we’ll come out and check to see if her mama came and got her."

So we cut this WIDE circle around the baby deer and went on our way. We felt good that we had given the little thing a chance.

It’s horrible to think, but you know it happens that a lot of farmers must just mow right over these little babies. Weird that nature has them be born at first cutting. But, then, I guess nature decided when they would be born before there even WAS a first cutting.

We did go back tonight to check. We waited till after dark, because deer are most active at dusk and we didn’t want to interrupt anything. Just as Amy said, the baby was gone. There was this matted-down place where it had been lying. I suppose now we can go back with the mower.

This is the hardest time of night for me — when there’s nothing left to do from the day and all I have left is to think. Sometimes I wish I could just run away from my head. Like, "Here, brain, I don’t want to deal with you anymore." It’s like there’s this big black sad thing inside of me and I don’t want to even LOOK at it. As long as I keep busy, I can avoid it. I know I’m going to have to look at it sometime and really deal with it. I just can’t right now.

Nite,

S


. To: katie@dundee.net
From: sarah@sarahspage.com
Date: 7-10
Subject: Princess? I Don’t Think So.

Katie,

Today we turned the hay. That’s when you go out and use this — well I don’t know — it’s a hay-flipper-thing you drag behind the tractor. It sort of fluffs up all the rows of mown hay and flips them over so they dry on the other side. We did that today.

Ellie has gotten tired of running beside the tractor. So now she just sits at the highest point in the field and watches us. Kind of like the foreman — uh, forewoman. I can just feel her saying, "Work, girls! Work."

So, it’s totally ironic that I saved A Little Princess book for last. Yeah, I know. WEIRD.

A refresher: They’re British, and it’s WWI. Her father, who has like a ga-jillion dollars, puts her in a New York boarding school while he goes off to war. I read somewhere that a lot of rich people during both WWI and WWII sent their kids away to the U.S. to keep them from being bombed off the face of the earth. So then the father DIES (but not really) and the British government seizes all his assets (I don’t get why) and Sarah (don’t even MAKE the comment) is toast. The totally evil headmistress makes her be a scullery maid. (What IS a scullery? Why does it need a maid?) And she has to live in the attic with the rats. And there’s this little black kid who’s her friend and is like the nicest kid in the world.

And the part that TOTALLY SUCKS is that at the end of the book, it turns out her father wasn’t really dead. He just lost his memory. (How many times have we seen THAT in a movie?) And he comes back and Sarah is rich again and the dad totally kicks the evil headmistress’s butt. Get REAL. Like that EVER HAPPENS.

So I was ready to throw the book in the manure pile. The only thing that keeps me from doing it is that Sarah has this really terrific imagination. And that part of the book is as cool as it ever was. She can imagine ANYTHING and it’s real to her. It’s so real that she gets the little black kid totally into it. Then all the rest of the kids in the boarding school (who are these completely snobby New York rich kids who diss Sarah entirely when she loses all her money) want to be her friend again because she tells these STORIES. And she makes everybody get INTO it. It’s like they can feel, and hear, and smell what she imagines. And throughout the whole book you get this sense that her imagination is this really good thing. I mean, they could have made it sound like she was totally delusional or something. But it’s not like that at all.

Remember when I first came out here and I wrote you about being sad. That was when I was sad about stupid stuff. Not like NOW when I really have something to be sad about. I remember saying that I thought the Web site was stupid and all this e-mail is stupid and that bytes on a chip are more important to me than the real world. I made like it was really lame.

I was wrong. I mean, this is MY WORLD. And it IS real, even if it is only bytes on a chip. Who’s to say that the real world is any REALER. Look at the old-guard world my parents lived in. You’d think that was real. You could smell it and touch it. Other people were there. But that, like, went out with the tide (pretty much literally). So I’m not going to diss my computer world anymore. It’s real. It’s a world. I live in it. And the site. I made it. It’s mine. It’s a lot more than just words. It’s sounds, and pictures. You can reach me, I can reach you. The only thing you can’t do is smell through the computer. But who knows? Technology is advancing every day. On the other hand, since the main odor around here is manure, it’s probably good there is not smell support on the Internet. What would they call that streaming technology anyway? RealAroma?

For a while now I’ve been regretting being born when I was, instead of, say, when Amy was born. Because if I was born then, there would still be money. But I guess there are advantages to being born when we were because of the whole TECHNOLOGY thing. We can create this new world and BE in it. I don’t know. Maybe I should have my head examined, saying that world on the screen inside the Internet is real in its own way. But I guess I’m just like that other Sarah. It’s real to me. I’m happy here. So beyond that, I guess nothing much matters.

Wow. I’ve gotten pretty deep. But these thoughts make me feel good. I’m going to try to hang on to the good feeling and go to sleep now.

S


. To: katie@dundee.net
From: sarah@sarahspage.com
Date: 7-11