All that Rowan Ashe came to be, all that she was meant to be, had its beginning on her thirteenth birthday.
Before that day, Rowan Ashe had been a typical girl. Certainly, her looks were nothing out of the ordinary. Her height was an average five feet four inches tall, her build was reed thin. Like most other girls, she wore her dirty blonde hair in a loosely drawn ponytail and dressed in blue jeans and a tee shirt most of the time. Her blue-gray eyes, which she thought should have been her best feature, were unfortunately obscured by the thick bottle-glass lens she wore to correct her severe myopia. Her white, almost pasty complexion was blessedly free of the acne that troubled so many of her contemporaries. Her nose was long and thin, her …show more content…
Middleburg, as the town was called, was situated in the northwest corner of Alder County, and boasted a population of 5,211 (soon to be 5,213, once Patty O’Brien had her second set of twins). Built on the shore of a diminutive lake by Swedish and German settlers decades before William Penn brought in his Quakers, Middleburg was the epitome of a small American town. It had one main street, on which all of its most important buildings, Town Hall, the Post Office, and the Savings and Loan Association, were located. It had two schools, an elementary and a high school, several churches of various faiths and denominations, and one synagogue. It had a two-story department store located in the heart of the business district, an haute cuisine restaurant rated five stars by the occasional critic, and a fast food restaurant beloved by the under eighteen crowd. Its citizens celebrated all the major holidays “in style”. During the Christmas holidays, the townspeople raised a giant fir tree in the middle of Town Square that they decorated with strings of lights and gaudy ornaments. Every Easter Sunday, they held the annual Easter egg hunt for children 10 and under on the Town Hall lawn. They celebrated The Fourth of July with a parade and a huge fireworks display and Veteran’s Day with a memorial service for soldiers who died in battle at the town cemetery. Everyone in Middleburg loved mom, baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie and prominently displayed American flags on their