The Girls of Summer

I’m waiting for the latest installment, for the 2015 picture of the Brown sisters.

 

In 1975 I was 16 going on 17; I recognize a lot of who I was in the portraits of the girls. Now women. Now probably grandmas. Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie. I don’t know them, yet I see them everywhere. The uncompromising stare, slight smiles or upturned mouth, but no teeth; strength born of change and the patience to endure whatever is coming next. Death, divorce, separation from loved ones, circumstances beyond their control. Lines and wrinkles, gray wiry hair, unadorned, plaited, pulled back, shorn, blowing in the breeze.

My emotions are so tied into the life represented by the photos that if they are late I worry. I know we are all aging, and that time waits for no woman. There will come a day when Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie become 3, then two, until one alone stands facing the camera. I feel their sisterhood, somehow included. The thought of losing even one pains me.

So I wait. And hope.

2014, Wellfleet, Mass. Nicholas Nixon