Free The Age of Miracles by Ellen Gilchrist Page A

answered. “I can see the pollen falling from the trees. The more I breathe, the more Seldane I have to take.”
    Here’s what Mr. Manny decided we should do. All go to Florida and stay a few weeks and if Miss Crystal gets well, buy a house there for her to live in when the going gets rough in New Orleans.
    It was Monday when we decided we should leave. By Tuesday afternoon we were out at the airport, only of course by then Mr. Manny had decided he couldn’t leave his work. Now that he has quit his law firm and gotten into environmental work he is a worse workaholic than he was when he was only doing it to make money. He is fighting to save the wetlands and has almost completely stopped wearing ties.
    So it was only Miss Crystal and Crystal Anne and myself who were boarding the plane. Crystal Anne and I sat together and Miss Crystal sat across the aisle reading a Vogue magazine and stopping every few minutes to blow her nose. “We will be there in two hours,” I told her several times. “Buck up your courage. We have solved worse problems than this.”
    â€œYou’re right,” Miss Crystal answered. “This is a very small problem. A problem we can fix.”
    â€œI was going to be the lilac fairy in the school play,” Crystal Anne noted for the third time. “I’ll never get to be the lilac fairy again.”
    â€œYou are going to Florida instead,” I told her. “Many little girls would give their eyeteeth for a week off from school to see the ocean.”
    We arrived in Saint Petersburg in the middle of the afternoon and a van from the hotel picked us up and carried us into town. It is a very spread-out city and quite clean and the hotel Mr. Manny had gotten for us was this very swanky hotel on the beach with an indoor pool and one outside near the ocean. Crystal Anne loves pools, although she also likes to swim in the ocean. Personally I do not like water that has chlorine in it. It reminds me too much of washday down in Boutte when my auntee would have water boiling with so much bleach in it the smell would fill the town.
    We settled down in two rooms with a door that opened between them. There were balconies that looked out onto the beach and the Gulf of Mexico. Crystal Anne was enchanted by the balconies and kept going from one to the other putting her dolls on the chairs and making little nests for them overlooking the sea. She is eight years old now, just as sweet as an angel, which she has been ever since the day that she was born. Born sweet and stayed sweet. Also, she has a very fine brain and she knows how to use it. She is like Mr. Manny in that. She does not let outside influences change the way she sees things. If she has a flaw, it is that she is very rigid about her likes and dislikes. If she likes someone, she will stick up for them no matter what. If she takes a dislike to them, watch out. Well, she took a dislike to Mr. Hotchkiss, which Miss Lydia later said only proved once again that a little child should lead us.
    But we had barely arrived and Mr. Hotchkiss had not showed up yet and so we took off our traveling clothes and went down to the pool to let Crystal Anne practice swimming.
    The people around the pool were very friendly. There was a couple from Maine who had met each other at a support meeting they went to after their spouses died. His had died and hers had died so they got together and have lived happily ever after for two years. They each talked a lot about the people they used to be married to. It seemed that was most of their conversation, plus some jokes he was making about the fact that she was fifteen years younger than he was and other jokes about the fact that she smoked. She mostly talked about sailing the British Virgin Islands with her dead husband who was her age and what a good sailor he was and their narrow escapes.
    I began to get the picture. Her on the sailboat with her young good-looking husband, the two of them