Thanks, Deb. There's so much I miss about Spain. This was just one small way of expressing that.

Susan, thanks for posting that link! Now, if I could find a similar link illustrating different regional French accents, I would be a very, very happy girl indeed.

It’s just a sweater, the color of new corn or maybe the butter you might put on it. I was a very different girl when this was the sort of thing that got my attention on the rack.(I was a girl, too. Seventeen. Here in the middle of the desert we keep our sweaters for a long time.) I still love this color but have accepted that my life is never going to match it. When I was seventeen, I wasn’t ready. I just believed so much I wanted everyone’s day to be yellow and soft. This is a sweater of a girl embarrassed that she might want somebody’s tongue in her mouth. This is a sweater she could buy in the store with her dad, one of the few things he ever liked to see her in.(She pretends she never wonders what she’d look like in one of those other kinds of sweaters, now that They have finally arrived. She pretends so well she believes herself. She’s better off not being stared at, anyway. She spends so much time in her room being better off, three books is a slow week.) So, now, thirties, cleaning her closet. ”What have you got there?”

“Nothing. Just a sweater. I guess I’ll hang on to it, though.”

Oof. erika, that's got a kick like a mule. Powerful.

Huh. Thanks.(I've still got the damn sweater, too)

Powerful drabble, Erika.

Thanks. Funny, though, probably the third one in which I've mentioned my late-arriving breasts. Hope y'all don't think I've got an obsession(much).

Babe, I don't think I really hit puberty until I was about 16. I went from stick-skinny and flat to, "Huh...curves" in about two months. It was very disconcerting.

"Oh. Look at those."

Pretty much. Training bras to a C cup. Poof.

ETA: Reminds me of that essay in that Susan Gilman book, though I think she went from flat to a DD.