I called you

You brought me up in dirt yards, on concrete and linoleum floors, in wooden churches. On self-ground peanut butter cookies and ice-cold self-squeezed lemonade. Thousands of miles from your New Jersey. The silence was filled with hymns, poems, readings. Limericks, jokes, prayers, and old, old songs. With dancing. And trudging through sand to church. Holding your hand.

There was a beach and there was sand, other sand, there was sunshine and splashing and crocodile jokes, frisbees and drip castles and heedlessness. We called it the Little Falls. You weren't there, and when I came home I was red and fiery and tender and sore to the touch, and everything hurt. You had a satiny pink nightgown and a satiny pink robe that had no seams anywhere and you wrapped me in those and for three days and nights I sat or lay on the green-and-white-striped vinyl stuffed chairs we always said we bought from the Norwegian ambassador, cradled in the gentle chill of your satin wrappings, pink against my fiery red, till finally my sunburn faded away. "You shouldn't have stayed out in the sun so long," you said.

Short years went by and there was another outing to the Little Falls, even though the shape of the beach and the water and the falls were different every time we went. Great crowds of white missionary teenagers and a few adult chaperones went along, and you were there. There was sunshine and splashing and crocodile jokes, and so much sand. I heard you calling me, but I was engrossed. I heard you calling me again, more desperately, and I turned around and you had fallen sideways onto the sand, other people had righted you because I hadn't come, and the side of your face and arm were covered in tiny glinting granules of sharp sand. "I called you," you said.