She walked across the gym floor on a humid night in May. She wore a sparkling emerald dress with a short chiffon train, the same color as her birthstone, and she smiled at the judges, holding them with her hazel eyes while making a slow half-turn.  

She turned eighteen earlier this month.

She will graduate next Thursday night.

But she wanted to do one last thing.

A chandelier made of silver streamers and plastic crystal beads hung from the basketball rim, along with draping white fabric that vacillated between pinks, purples, and greens in the shifting colored lights. The girls walked across a gray tarp that protected the polished wooden floor from their sharp heels.

What do you do when you live in a small town with no theater and no auditorium except what space there is in the church sanctuaries? 

Your local school gymnasium becomes the Academy of the Performing Arts, Convention Center, and Cultural Entertainment Venue, where you can attend the band concerts, barbecue dinners, chitterling suppers, dance recitals, Veterans’ Day programs, booster club meetings, amateur wrestling matches, Christmas Village craft sales, donkeyball games, and kindergarten graduations.

And tonight, the spring beauty pageant.

There were little girls just finishing preschool, walking slowly, gathering their dresses so as not to trip, along with elegant young women striding confidently across the floor, ready to step out into adulthood.

All contestants received an award. There is a time and a place for true competition, but not at a small town beauty pageant, if you can help it. Being the only little girl with no ribbon around your neck or no trophy to hold crushes the soul. There was a maximum of six girls in each division. With the categories of Most Photogenic, People’s Choice, Prettiest Smile, Prettiest Dress, three levels of alternate, and the winner, the judges had plenty of options.

So whether it was intentional, or whether it just happened like that, it was a good thing.

It was a good last pageant.

Arrangements of piano music from Disney movies provided a backdrop for the emcee’s descriptions of each girl’s favorite activities. I half-listened to her voice, my ear drawn instead toward the quiet melody of a song from Toy Story 2:

“When somebody loved me
Everything was beautiful
Every hour we spent together
Lives within my heart

“And when she was sad
I was there to dry her tears
And when she was happy so was I
When she loved me

“Through the summer and the fall
We had each other that was all
Just she and I together like it was meant to be
And when she was lonely
I was there to comfort her
And I knew that she loved me”

The young women, who had been friends, classmates, and cheerleading squad teammates, snapped the final pictures of the last school activity they will ever do before they graduate.

But they shed no tears. That will come Thursday and in the days leading up.

Some will never wear pageant or prom dresses again. Those days are over. The next formal dress they wear will be their wedding gown.

After all the trophies, sashes, and crowns had been awarded, some of the little girls took pictures with the young women. Their small, round faces shone as they gazed at the young women, their eyes beaming with admiration and wonder.

Their little minds are grasping at something greater than themselves, though they are incapable of realizing the full measure of what it all means and how quickly it will all go, and probably most of their parents with them.

How could they ever stand it if they really knew growing up goes by in one great blur?

It is best that they don’t know, not right now. Some knowledge is too hard to accept all at once. It is best to spread it out and absorb the lessons a little at a time:

By counting the hours and holding them in their hearts. 

By drying each others’ tears when they are sad.

By making happy memories together during summer and fall and all the seasons of the year, through their sports or music or academics, through their love for hunting or fishing or four-wheeling, whether wandering the woods, shopping for shoes, or caring for their farm animals.

By comforting each other when they are lonely.

And may they always remember the most important part, especially during those hard years of adolescence when independence is gained in abrupt stops and starts, about like trying to learn to drive a stick shift:

They must keep loving each other.

Because one day, soon, they will have their one last thing, and when they do, I hope they have the memory of the spring pageant when there was a girl in a sparkling emerald dress.

When it was her last thing.

Maybe then, they will have learned the lesson in full, and they will realize this life really is a vapor.

Now I need someone to dry my tears.