Girls Who Press Flowers

I used to press flowers into books. When I was young, the natural, wilted death of a wildflower seemed so unjust. Purple petals to gray. Dying in the sun. We never came to the mountains in the fall- only in the green summer and the blue silver winter- and so I had no understanding of the cycle and I never saw the golds. Just gray. Though I was mostly right, wasn't I? Wildflowers do not get caught in the fall.
Now I come here as an adult. Alone, if it can be done, and I sift through the same books that have sat on these same shelves for nearly twenty years. They are my grandparents' books, conservative and a little stuffy with titles like, "The Libertarian's Bible," and in them, in many of them, are my tiny, flattened wildflowers.
I do not read these books, but I search them for the petals and smile when I meet my ten year old self. Knobby, with ears that my head had not yet grown into, who dreamed of becoming a singer of commercial jingles and having a roly poly farm.


Thus far, most of my adulthood has surprised me. Not much has happened that I can say I saw coming. A too thoughtful girl who ran away to the Caribbean, where she lived in the trees, got to understand creatures, almost grew into her ears, decided along the way that she really only wanted to eat plants, and dreams of living everywhere else. Where did she come from?
And then I find these pressed flowers and realize that people don't actually change at all.