Been meaning to join this year’s project but thought you didn’t have time? Check out our new timeline! You now have until May 15, 2013, to get on board. The 2013 theme is “Wild Things.” Questions? edg@longridgeeditors.com.
http://essaysonchildhood.com/writing-guidelines-and-current-schedule/
Over the past year, I’ve become fascinated with stories about childhood encounters with animals. It started with Julian Martin’s description of his grandmother clubbing, skinning, and cooking a groundhog; since then, it seems everywhere I turn I hear great stories about courage, life and death, love and affection, loyalty and hearbreak connected to children and animals.
What’s your story?
via Essays on Childhood: Wild Things | Esse Diem.
Often, I was the one who stayed an hour or so with Grandma so that Dad could bathe, eat dinner, or pay bills. I had one job: Make sure Grandma did not leave the house. How ironic it was that going home to her meant leaving the house that she and my grandfather built forty years before. Her mind was trapped in a much earlier time.The road that she traveled to get home was a rutted dirt road populated by horses and buggies and the occasional car that moved aside whenever the driver saw someone walking along the road. She did not recognize that it was seventy years later; by now the road was a major U.S. highway, well-traveled by cars and tractor-trailers that would not see her walking in the middle of the road until it was too late.
Ours was the third house to be built in the ‘new’ neighborhood. A subdivision of homes was being built in the woods. THE WOODS. We moved into the house in the fall, and I played in the woods around the house beginning then and through the winter. When I turned seven in April my mother sent me outside to play.
“No really, you have to go outside… and play… Go…”
So I went. Outside. Into THE WOODS.
via In a Man’s Voice: Outside by Brent Aikman | Esse Diem.
Middle school started to show me that football could put a boy at the top of the popularity totem pole. The players always seemed to have the prettiest girls talking to them and they got the most attention around school. That was especially true when game day arrived. The team members always had a tradition of wearing their jerseys at school all throughout that day. The school would be dotted with light blue jerseys bouncing around campus. Everybody got excited for the games, especially if they were playing at home. Those days we didn’t have to ride the school bus home. We could stay after school, watch the game, and have our parents pick us up after the game was over. But when you saw those blue jerseys around campus, they were not being worn by the players.
In a lot of cases, those jerseys were being worn by girls.
via In a Man’s Voice: The Jersey by Vernon Wildy, Jr. | Esse Diem.
Filed under Essays on Childhood: In a Man's Voice, Writing
Once I strolled down the beach with my mom when I was a little girl. We were looking for shells after a long day of salty air and strong sun and my eyes were tired. To be honest, I did not really want to be there except my mom and I always looked for shells together and there was no where else to go. I kept staring at the grains of sand and could only find thin, cracked shells that had been tossed one too many times in the powerful arms of the ocean.
Although my mom did not want to pick those shells up, I thought they were the most beautiful ones. Their colors were the most vibrant and I imagined that if they could talk, the broken ones would have the most interesting story.
