The Year I Turned Sixteen by Diane Schwemm

Why would anything be different today? But she just hugged me and said, “My oldest girl is turning sixteen. After all, no one’s been in the mood for a party for three months. She’s an awesome cook and always goes all out for special occasions, but this morning I’d told her it was fine if we skipped the festivities. Inside the house I could tell right away that my mother, Maggie Walker, had been chopping and roasting and sifting and baking all afternoon. Plus it’s my only opportunity all year to get a taste of independence. There aren’t many opportunities to get musical training in rural Maine, so Wildwood was a total stroke of luck. I want to be a singer, and Wildwood is a performance camp-I won a scholarship there a few years ago, and I’ve been going every summer. Summer is just around the corner, and that means pretty soon I’ll be heading off to be a counselor at Wildwood, a camp in Vermont. The water was speckled with sailboats and fishing trawlers that reminded me of my dad’s old boat, the Pelican. Standing on tiptoe, I could see a distant sliver of the Atlantic, past the pines and the rocky shore. This afternoon on my way in from school I stopped on the porch of my family’s Victorian house.

Then there are days like today, May 21, my sixteenth birthday, when I can’t imagine living anywhere else. Those are the days I can’t wait to graduate and move to New York or L.A. Now and then I find myself wondering what it would be like to live someplace crowded and exciting. We don’t even have our own exit off the Maine Turnpike.Īnd needless to say, the nightlife is rather limited. We have to share a high school with a bunch of other towns. There’s one grocery store and one gas station and one bank. Hawk Harbor is the kind of place where everybody knows everybody else. SOMETIMES I WISH I didn’t live in a small town.

The Year I Turned Sixteen by Diane Schwemm