Pink? Really?

This picture makes me sad. At first when I look at it I think "Awe, look how stinking cute I was. Wow I woulda made cute babies."  But then the more I looked at it, and looked at it and looked at it, I started to get an uneasy feeling in my stomach. I kept returning to it. I recognize my great grandparent Jenkins' backyard off the Avenue in Ventura. I have good memories of that place. I remember the avocado tree and the sound the avocados would make as they fell off the tree, hitting and rolling from the roof. My Grandpa Jenkins would tell me to go get it and I would scurry off to find my prize. Then Grandpa would cut it in half, put salt and pepper on it, sit me down at the kitchen table and hand me a spoon. "Eat it up", he'd say. And we would share that avocado together. It was our thing.

So it's not the location in the picture that bothers me, it's not the fact that my little top doesn't cover much of anything so why even bother? It's not the pudgy fat rolls or the fact that I was wearing pink. PINK!! or that I never knew I was a blond. No, what I think made me so uncomfortable looking at this picture is that happy little face and those bright, sparkly fun-filled eyes. You see, I don't have many pictures of me as a kid, and very few from my earliest years, but what I do know is that if you look back at all my pictures, my eyes were never that alive, never that happy, never that carefree and definitely never so innocent again.