Part 7

        Mrs. Mayhew's voice echoed up the staircase. "Caaaa-leb! Your mother's on the phone!"
        "Awwww, again??" he groaned. "I just talked to her after school..." His footsteps on the stairs reverberated as loud as thunder through the old walls as he headed downstairs. (There was, of course, a phone in my room, but each of the rental rooms was on a different line from the main house, for privacy and to make sorting out the bills easier.)
        I finished flipping through the pictures on my camera, then crossed the room to set it on the dresser. I suddenly realized I felt lonely - I hadn't expected that to happen, I was usually pretty independent. But having always had my sister underfoot at home, and then a million other people always around in the dorms, I guess I wasn't used to having real privacy. I'd always thought I wanted it, but now I really wasn't sure what to do with myself.
        So I sat at the desk and flipped open my laptop, reaching around to hook up the phone line. I was going to have to deal with a dial-up connection, but at least it was some contact with the outside world...

        The rest of the week was pretty uneventful. I went to work each day, where it was basically more of the same, though I slowly started joining in the conversations in the office. The mornings and evenings were my own, and I got to know the Mayhews' place better. I took plenty of pictures around the yard and gardens, but didn't venture too far into the woods - I was wary of getting lost, I didn't want to go in again without knowing where an actual trail was. Without really being conscious of the decision, I decided I'd wait until the weekend, when I could follow the boys out there - couldn't get lost if they were near. I remembered how well I knew the (admittedly much smaller) wooded area back home when I was a kid, and I was sure it was the same with Caleb and his buddies, as well as half of the other young members of the extended family.
        I fell into the habit of helping Mrs. Mayhew with the dinner dishes every night. I didn't mind, and I think we both enjoyed the company for a bit. She was, as I've said, full of a thousand stories, of family and the town and the house, but I soon learned that there was a lot of insight in her chatter. I made some mention of the fact that Caleb spent so much time here, and I thought it was really nice that he was able to be so close with his grandparents - mine always lived just far enough away that I saw them maybe once a month or so, spending a week with them in the summer here and there. She smiled at that, and said he definitely livened up the place when he was around, but something in her tone told me there was more to it, a bit of sadness maybe. I realized that, though Caleb was always here, I had yet to even catch a glimpse of his parents, and the Mayhews never mentioned them. I had a hunch there was some family resentment somewhere along the way, and given Caleb's constant visits, it seemed pretty likely that his parents' house wasn't the happiest place for him to be. I didn't want to pry, though, so I kept my questions to myself, knowing that more information would seep into conversation sooner or later.
        Friday evening, a big SUV crunched into the gravel driveway, and a small swarm of excited children whooshed out into the yard, immediately beginning to chase each other around and screech and laugh. Caleb, who had turned up earlier in the afternoon on his bike, tried to sneak off out of the house, but Mrs. Mayhew caught him in the act, and, very sweetly, and very authoratively, suggested he let Dillon tag along with him. Caleb grumbled a bit at that, but five minutes later I saw the two of them completely engrossed in some sort of (probably horrifying) experiment with some bugs they'd found, so it seemed he didn't mind his cousin as much as he'd let on. Boys.
        Being nearby, I was introduced all around - again, making me feel more like a family friend than a tenant, not that I minded. The two little girls were absolutely adorable, and they attached themselves to my legs at the earliest opportunity. I spent the better part of the evening being pulled around by the two of them. They showed me the room they always stayed in, I was introduced to a dozen or so dolls and stuffed animals, I had to of course give them a tour of my own room, and they would have taken me around the barn to introduce me to all of the animals (which they had named), but their parents canceled that plan for the moment, as it was getting dark and already well past the girls' bedtime. I had to promise I'd still be there in the morning, for them to finish the tour. I actually turned in early myself that night, still trying to readjust my internal clock after a semester of 3am bedtimes and 10am wake-ups.

        Saturday morning, I woke up at 6:30, and realized I wasn't going to be able to fall back asleep. I didn't really mind, the sun was up and it was that perfect time of morning. I hurriedly pulled on some clothes, and skipped the shower for the time being, just running a comb under the bathroom sink and yanking it through my bedhead hair...and then I gave up and just pulled my hair back into a cutely-sloppy ponytail. I snagged my cameras and a good couple of rolls of film, and moved as quietly out of the house as I could manage (though I still hadn't quite memorized all the creaky spots on the stairs, and a few let out loud groans on my way down).
        Once outside, I just stood there for a few minutes, taking slow, deep breaths and looking around, letting the gentle quiet of the morning seep into my veins. The air was a little chilly again, but it smelled so fresh and clean. The sky was the palest blue, almost white near the horizon, the sun almost invisible in the brightness it suffused into the atmosphere around it. I lifted up my digital camera and took a shot or two over the fields toward the sunrise...then thought better of it, and brought up my SLR, which was again loaded with black and white film. There wasn't much color to the scene to begin with, and something in the back of my mind told me to use the black and white film, I had this strange and unexpected...intuition, I suppose it was, some wordless feeling that the film would capture an atmosphere that would... I really didn't know at the time, I just knew it would be a good thing, some part of me knew that the film would capture the quiet serenity of the morning along with the freshness of the light I was used to my decisions being much more conscious than that, I was used to seeing something, thinking it looked pretty, maybe lining up a composition, and snapping a shot, and being done with it. But this...this was something different, maybe it was the atmosphere of the early hour, the intensity of the light in the small space of time before it was pushed aside by the harshness of human voices and manmade motion... I could feel an odd mood moving slowly through me, I felt... detached from my world, but more a part of something else... Not like I was "at one with nature" or any cheesy hippie shit like that, but... like I was brushing against the veil to a different layer of the air around me, like the difference between looking at something through a layer of plastic wrap and the clarity when the plastic's removed, or the moment when the vague chords of a song playing quietly in the distance suddenly resolve as you recognize the song.