there was a boy…

Actually, there were any number of boys in 1885.  One knows that quite well.  Still, there is something almost tangible about looking at a pencil line recording that boy’s height on a convenient wall.  One of the more poignant touches in Esperanza is the growth chart on a corner post in one of the upstairs rooms.  It was used between c.1885-1950.  And somehow, people become so much more real when one can run a finger across a pencil line that marked their height when they were five or six or ten.  Most of the people on that chart are long, long gone (not all! :)).  Yet…they were young once; someone, perhaps a doting grandmother?, had them stand there, ‘Stand up straight now!’ and carefully drew a line in heavy pencil. And time bends into stillness.