As a little girl, I always wanted to parallel my great-grandmother's footsteps with  Peter Pan. I wanted to experience his courage to stand against time. I wanted to hear him crow and fight and scold tinkerbell. My mother says he always meant to came back around spring cleaning time, though his sense of time was completely off. You see, in Neverland, there are several suns and many moons. I think he learned not  to expect Wendy after some time because my grandmother had to remind him that she was called Jane, and my mother after her reminded him that she was called Margaret. But now I think he has truly forgotten. They always recall, though, the chief Redskin’s pipe, whistling  a warning.
“Julie, my love,” my mother would say, “patience. He will come for you when he needs spring cleaning.”
“Will he, mother?” I would always ask. He did not come until I was nearly fifteen years old. By that time, I had given up on the stories my mother had told me. She stopped telling them when I was nine. I told her it made me too sad.
But he came. I brushed his tears and sewed his shadow again to his feet. He sprinkled a little fairy dust on me and whispered in my ear to think of my favorite happy thought. And he flew me to Neverland. But he was taller than I thought. He did not look like a young, carefree twelve year old boy. He must have been closing on his manhood years. I would he was guess sixteen or seventeen. He did exactly as he swore he never would. He grew up.
It was dark and foreboding. Without the lost boys, Peter had obviously become sad and cold. He felt pain and loss. He had lost the thing he loved the most. He lost his boys when they found themselves. And, unfortunately, that’s what forces a person to grow up.
When we landed, he took my left hand in his right and led me through an iced over path. We came to an open field where a small hut stood and, instinctively, I knew it was the house he and the lost boys had built for my great-grandmother, Wendy. It was little, just like she’d sung. With little red walls and a vibrant mossy green roof. This shocked me , considering the icy chill that had set in the forest around us. Shouldn’t moss turn brown when it gets too cold? My great uncle John’s hat was still on the roof, like a little chimney. Still gripping my hand, he lead me inside. It was warm. A small fire was lit in the center of the room. How it had stayed lit without someone here to tend it, I still do not know. Perhaps a new set of fairies had kept its little flames licking at the biting cold. For the first time, I felt pain for this boy. He was not the gay, innocent and heartless boy my mother knew. For a moment, I was afraid and I did not want to be alone with the boy with the mossy green eyes and sun-bleached strawberry hair. I did not want him to come close to me. Instead, he sat down by the fire.
“I want a story,” he started, “a story of escaping loneliness.”
With that, I sat by him as well. I no longer felt fear or distrust. I felt sorrow. So I began.
“All children grow up, except one.”