"Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage."
From"The Writer" by Richard Wilbur, 1987 Nobel Laureate of the
“Your baby teeth are going to fall out soon.”
“Really? Oooh.”
As simple as this exchange seems between my dad and my sister, it makes me realize just how young Emily is. Having been so caught up in the act of growing up, I have been looking too much forward instead of noticing the little five-year-old kid tagging at my heels. As I prepare to go to college and enter a much wider world than any that I have seen, I can’t help but wonder what kind of world I will leave my sister to face alone. Pretty soon, life will bare its fangs to reveal more than baby teeth, and I will not be present to watch her back or stand beside her in person as I do now. In the face of such an awful truth, I am utterly terrified.
Since the beginning of her life, I tried my best to defend her from any harm. Though people perceived my job as the “big sister” to be the hardest, I felt Emily had the most difficult task of all: growing up. Therefore, I tried to teach her as much as I could: lessons as simple as how to read and how to tie shoes to complex ones concerning respect and compassion for others. At first, without the knowledge of how to walk, she always stayed in one place and stared with alert eyes. However, as she began to crawl, then walk and finally run, I could get my sister to keep still less and less. At any rate, I started to see that as much as I wished to hold my little sister tightly in my arms as I did on Day One, she had other ideas: she wished to skip, run, and hop her way through all that she did. Seeing this, I desperately wanted her to be in arm’s reach instead: I wished she would linger long enough for me to warn her of the troubles ahead.
Despite my diligently hovering over my little sister, she still manages to slip occasionally past the threads of the safety net. Last week, as we were walking out towards the car, she ran and, with a spectacular leap, drove herself smack dab into the concrete ground of the parking lot. Before I could sprint over to help her, she got up and, without one tear, dusted herself off.
What she did that day made me understand that somehow, she wasn’t that little anymore. Even when I couldn’t watch over her, she was fully capable and willing to never let any obstacle keep her down. She had learned by herself the one thing that I couldn’t teach her with words: perseverance.
As I gave her a hug, I couldn’t help but return her smile, knowing that we both would be just fine—that I, like her, would be perpetually running towards the direction of our greatest hopes, advancing confidently towards the finish line in a great journey that has only just begun.
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