beverlypenn

She watches her toes in the moist sand, the way her feet dissapear and reappear in harmony with the ebb and flow of the current. She remembers the way she once hated her feet; too slender and small for an awkwardly tall, young child. She finds it ironic how her perception even over little things has changed; the way long limbs and lean muscles make her feel stately now when they once made her ill at ease. And this also makes her recall how her mother would scold her for spending too much time in the powerful waters, fascinated by the ugliest of its attributes like the sticky seaweed or the dead jellyfish that lined the beach. She would lie in

Everywhere I look there are the unmistakable signs of a culture that values youth above much else, perhaps to such an excessive extent that it tosses aside responsibility, maturity, independence, even self-reliance. This change has been a slow progression over the years, seeping from one generation to the next, but it seems that the consequences are becoming too massive to ignore for much longer. Walking down the hall in a college academic complex I hear a "young" girl, around the age of twenty, on the phone with a parent yelling at them to schedule a doctor's appointment for her. Eighteen year olds who live in dorm rooms, legally noted as a