Old Souls

This is Ruby in her element.  (Paris, 2013ish) Most people have to grow up and leave home before they find their happy place, but Golda and Ruby were fortunate enough to "leave home" before they left home, and to discover some of their predilections before they became the fully formed adults who would be capable of  pursuing them further.  It's a blessing and a curse.  

Ruby wants to go somewhere far away for spring break, and she doesn't mind going alone.  She has the teaching money, and she is old enough to fly as an adult on most airlines, but not old enough to stay in a shared room in a hostel.  That's her dilemma.  Most girls her age have problems like not getting asked to a dance, or what to wear to a dance, or how to study for the AP tests.  Ruby's problem is not being old enough to stay in a shared hostel in Morocco.  It's a real problem, I'm telling you.

I said to her, "Come and go to Phoenix with us.  It's warm and sunny."  She smirked and threw this out:  "That's exactly what I was thinking about Barbados."  Curse Skyscanner.  It's always telling Ruby where she can go, and for how cheaply.  And it's never Phoenix.  Skyscanner never answers a search with "You should stay home and finish your math."  Instead, it gives you practical applications for math, such as adding two numbers together: the first leg and the second leg of your flight.

I can sense that Ruby feels like these skeletons, stuck here in her own version of the catacombs, doing endless homework.  Her window to the outside world right now is her Swaziland library project.  It's something, but it doesn't solve the problem of high school. She was telling me that she went to Bowman's to buy ingredients for a church thing she's in charge of.  She said a "cute little high school girl" was the cashier.  Never mind that Ruby is, herself, a cute little high school girl.  Even since she was born with a very old soul, we've been waiting for the world around Ruby to catch up with her.  It hasn't.  Perhaps it never will.  Looking at the picture of Ruby on the Metro, though, I have to believe that there is a place for her where she won't feel like she's waiting for life to begin.  As much as I don't want Ruby to be here, living a shadow of the life she knows is out there for her, I also don't want her to leave.  But if anyone has a house in Barbados they're not using in March, well, I could spare her for a week.