There are experiences that have no age, even when the people in them are children and one of them is you. The image remains with you just below the conscious level, and nothing that's happened to you since in any stage of love seems to equal it.

A summer rain in the dry San Garbiels causes a lot of excitement. The dusty pine needles drain off into powdery earth, and there is the expectant feeling of a very special event; even the smell is special. I am in a cabin in those mountains when the rains come, and I am thirteen and in love with my cousin of fourteen. Of course the family is there with us, and we are visiting.

While the rain falls, sentimental songs play on the ancient phonograph. The words are as foolish as the mannered voices singing them, but the word love occurs frequently, and it has recently become a powerful word to me. So I gaze dreamily away while everyone else is laughing at the quaintness of the music, and they tease me about it. I long for older times when thirteen-year-old girls were thought marriageable women and could be dead in childbirth at fifteen. That short, intense life could be richer than dreams of roses, but I'm expected to live a long time and not to discover my sexual self for many more years... maybe when I'm twenty-one it's supposed to happen... and at thirteen that seems like another century.

In the stormy evening when our families go off to bed one by one, leaving us to lantern light and the fire burning down to glowing ashes, our eyes want to meet and detonate the charged air. But we are both suddenly afraid of something, so we agree without words to dance. His fingers at my waist feel like misplaced coals, and when the phonograph winds slowly to a stop, neither of us moves to restart it. The rushing of the rain water down the dry gullies outside is now very loud. All the earth's messages seem to tell us to come together, and our eyes finally engage in that long-deferred glance.

But there are stirrings of late-night activity from our family, and we are reminded that the planet is not solely our own. A spark has fallen on the Navajo rug, and I rush to put it out while he restores function to the phonograph. The electric moment is gone.

We make hot chocolate and discuss the meteorology of the rainstorm. After all, he is a science prodigy, and rain cannot be regarded as merely romantic. The phenomena of nature occupy much of our daily discussions and contemplations, believing fervently as we do that everything man can perceive in the cosmos will someday be understood. When we are both sleepy, we part at his bedroom door, and our goodnight kiss is as soft and sensual as it is brief.

When I awake alone and lost at 3 A.M., I know something cataclysmic is happening. There is a dense blackness and silence in my room, but I'm sure some loud noise awoke me. Then I feel the earth buzzing and humming through the planks of the floor, up through the old iron bedframe and into my very bones. There is am immense crackling sound and a sizzle of the most intense light I've ever dreamed of: every object in the room has its halo. Instantly, a roar of sound shocks my bed and floor and room and roof. Outside, crashing reverberations roll up and down the mountainside and out into the valley, echoes reinforcing echoes.