Ways to Measure Growth by Erin Strickler

Ways to Measure Growth

by Erin Strickler

There are marks on the wall in my grandmother’s foyer and when I was ten I was the size of my father when he was seven and my brothers were

average until they weren’t. My grandmother had a bougainvillea and the first thing she said to my mother when she wanted to start a garden over

summer break was, “Stay away from the bougainvillea because once it spreads it doesn’t stop,” like ivy on stone walls, forcing its way into the cracks and crevices.

There are girls with their hair dyed straight from the box but you wouldn’t be able to tell because it didn’t change the color from brown to auburn, it just kept brown as

brown. They sit, sinking into burgundy velvet, and talk about joy like a foreign object, like a guilt trip, and the woman at the desk across says, “Just let light be light.”

There are physicists in auditoriums, there are students with their heads down as the professor talks about the visibility of light and says that, even though we are taught

color is the form light takes when it steps out before us, the math tells us rather bluntly that all of light is invisible, because the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one

direction and infinity in the other. So how do we recognize light long enough to allow it the pleasure of being? How do the girls see it, the bougainvillea in the garden?

Then I think of the lizards, how they shed their skin, not all at once, but in wavering frequency and patches: it just depends how fast they are growing.