One Summer in Savannah by Terah Shelton Harris EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Terah Shelton Harris
- Language: English
- Genre: Black & African American Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
SARA
IT’S DIFFICULT TO PINPOINT the moment I started loving my daughter. I wish it
were when she fluttered inside me for the first time. Or when I cradled her
tiny body seconds after birth. The truth is, my love for her started much later,
when the reality of her conception had faded enough for me to see only her,
when I realized that she, like me, was a survivor.
Probably, though, there was no one moment but an aggregation of
moments, many of them happening because of her vulnerability: when she
suffered through her first bout with colic, during her fussiness over cutting
three teeth simultaneously—moments when a maternal mixture of emotions
and hormones hummed through me, signaling that it was normal for me to
love her and reminding me over and over again that having her was well
worth the emotional cost.
I study her now, playing down in the water. Her long hair catches in the
breeze, whipping sandy strands across her golden face, her unafraid green
eyes watching, waiting for the next wave. These features—his features—are
all I remember about her father. And yet, what I didn’t know about him I see
in her, like a window into a stranger’s soul. Her drawings always resemble, a
bit too perfectly, her intended goal. A dog. A tree. A house. Her proficiency
for mathematics, in algebra, in trigonometry, in calculus. Talent you’re born
with, not taught. I often wonder if she doesn’t eat fish because he didn’t or if
she loves to swim because he did. One thing is for sure: she is all him and
none of me. And that single thought terrifies me.
“Mom!” Alana yells, pulling me from my thoughts. “How long was I
under that time?”
I close my notebook, its lined pages almost blank, and glance at my watch.
“Fifty-two seconds.”
She twists her full lips and churns her arms to control herself in the strong
current of Howard Cove. “I can do better.”
Alana possesses the intensity of someone far beyond her eight years. She
is already stronger, more determined, more driven than I was when I had her
at eighteen, like she is living her life at a faster clip than everyone else.
“One more time, and then we have to go.”
“Aww…Mom,” Alana says, her shoulders collapsing with the weight of
disappointment. The water moves her a bit, and she makes herself straighten
up and tread again. “Can’t we stay just a little while longer?”
I don’t want this day to end either. Just after nine, Alana had leaped into
my bed, sending a wave of sheets billowing into the air. She settled against
me, her right forearm propped against my thigh, her left hand moving
steadily, her finger drawing something on my knee, probably another clock.
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