I fell in love when I was seven

I fell  in love for the first time when I was seven. The woman, though I suppose she was only 15 or so, was the daughter of a family friend's, who stayed with us for a week near our summer house. The day I first fell in love it was dreadfully hot. On the grass, gnats were swarming in and out of geometric shapes. Everything outside looked wilted, trees leaves were curling down, and the dog was lying in a the shadow of the house, panting as if he'd been running all afternoon.


The girl, Claire, didn't say anything to me as I played a game of war between my Transformers and some rubber dinosaurs. Who's to say who would win if it came to a fight between a T-Rex and an autobot? The T-Tex was larger, and I scooted him across the floor rather awkwardly because his tail was longer than his legs and struck the floor first, making walking naturally a near impossibility. This minor fact would eventually bring about the extinction of the dinosaurs though the details of that battle are now sketchy.



Claire sat in the corner of the room, at a bay window that gave a view of a gigantic oak that stretched up as if it might one day pierce the sky. She looked out the window pensively, the down on her cheeks was visible in the warm light. Was she beautiful? I don't really remember if she was aesthetically perfected, but I remember having a sense that she was beautiful. I had this feeling after watching her assemble a fleet of swans from a few sheets of scrap paper that she brought up to the room. While she stared out the window, probably thinking of some boy or her distant friends, her hands worked furiously turning the blank nothingness of a paper into swans. I understood then that she was made beautiful by the act of creation.



At first the swans were regular seeming swans that I've seen since in other people who were expert at origami. She produced three or four swans, similar looking, though upon closer inspection it was clear that she'd made a male swan and a female, arcing her neck ever so slightly to keep an eye on the two almost infinitesimally smaller swans, juveniles I suppose, who were behind her.


As the afternoon took shape, a slight breeze stirred the leaves of the oak and drove the gnats from the grass. That night we had a summer storm, with heat lightning and the deafening crack of thunder. But that was still hours away and as Claire worked the shapes grew increasingly more ornate and beautiful. Soon she was making replicas of the dinosaurs and Transformer that I was playing with, and, again upon closer inspection, a replica of me playing with the dinosaurs, now made so small as to be able to be cupped in my little paper hand. It took a magnifying glass to see the sort of craftsmanship that she was somehow capable of that afternoon. I searched this all out after she'd left the room, taking a short walk down by the deep blue lake water before the storm set in.

I'd like to think that love or falling in love is the sort of thing that makes sense, but the truth of the matter is that sometimes it comes for you wildly, suddenly, like a summer storm, rain pebbling the water that slaps against the dock. I became aware in a matter of a few minutes that Claire was capable of something that I'd never be capable of, a kind of creative spark that eludes me to this day, and so I did the next best thing I could think of, I fell in love with the hands of the creator, with the down on her cheeks, with the bit of red in her hair.


You would think year later that I'd never think of her, and in fact I don't all that often. I have children of my own and a wife. And yet sometimes I'll step outside and feel the warm air brushing past my forearms, goose pimpling my arms, and I'll think suddenly of that afternoon, of those small white hands creating a world that was wholly dependent and satisfied by itself. I think of that small paper boy, holding a small paper dinosaur, on a small rug, wasting away an afternoon under the watchful gaze of the Creator.