You never truly know what you have, until you try to live without it. Until something you love is taken, you don’t know how fortunate you are. You take everyday things for granted, like listening to the wind swirl around the branches of a giant oak or hearing the night owls call farewell to each other in the mist of the evenings. Sometimes I want the sounds. Since birth, all I have heard is silence. It makes me sad, not…
The wind burns my face as Willow and I bound over tree roots and the soft earth of the forest. The sun-dappled woodlands stretch invitingly before us. The majestic spread of leaves lies like a masterpiece, untouched by human or horse. Eagerly Willow gallops into it, causing the leaves to blow up like a bomb. The horse snorts delightedly. It is a crisp late-November morning in Lake Ariel, Pennsylvania. To our left glitters the frigid cobalt lake. The ducks, Jack…
Abby heard a long, distant call, somewhere out there in the night. A trumpeting call, like a bugle or maybe it was only the wind. Snow whirled past the cabin window in an endless parade of white, and the wind moaned as it blew around the corner of their house. There had been blizzards like this last March, but this year was different. Abby didn’t feel content inside, as Mama sewed and Papa whittled in the flickering light of the…
It had been one of those days when the sun could not seem to make up its mind whether it wanted to hide behind a curtain of clouds or look out over the world. Throughout the day the light had alternated between the brilliant gold of autumn leaves and the darkness that inspired the owl to open his eyes. The sky was sometimes a deep azure blue, laced with soft white clouds; sometimes it was the deep gray of a…
I can still remember the day I met my best friend. I rode my bike past her house a few days after she had moved in. The afternoon air was clear and crisp, and a few fluffy white clouds danced over my head in the breeze. There had been a storm that morning, so the essence of rain swept softly over my skin, and stray drops of water hung from the trees. I noticed her horse right away. That was…
“Look!” A little brown head bobbed out from under the dock; the feet under it propelled it around the reeds and out of sight. “What was that thing?” asked Ted, almost falling into the water trying to find it. “A muskrat, kids. You can use that in your essay when we get back to school,” said Miss Cole. Ann Dover looked out at the ripples shimmering and glistening with the reflected sun. She sighed, her breath sending a gray smoke-like…
Hannah leapt out of the truck, hardly able to restrain herself. Snow had come, winter had come! And here she was, about to spend a full afternoon cross-country skiing with Grandpa; the first time since last March when they had been forced to leave early due to the rapid melting of the snow. Around the parking lot, the deep woods looked inviting. Hannah followed the trail with her eyes until the first bend, and, wondering what secrets the rest of…
It’s dead. That was twelve-year-old Julian Horowitz’s first thought when he spotted the kitten in the white-blanketed woods when he was walking home from school. The kitten was vividly orange and bright white colored, reminding Julian of a Creamsicle ice cream bar. It (Julian didn’t know whether the kitten was male or female) was partially covered by a sheet of snow, and the kitten wasn’t moving, making Julian almost positive the kitten was dead. Julian slowly reached out his hand…
Mon, when is Bubbe coming?” I asked impatiently. “Soon,” she replied for the seventeenth time. It was a family tradition for my grandma to come over every Saturday to light the havdalah candle, a symbol that the Jewish Sabbath has ended, with our family. I was sitting on the steps of the porch when I heard the steady tap . . . tap . . . tap of her cane. “Bubbe!!!” I exclaimed. “Hello, sweetheart!” said Bubbe, while embracing me….
Winter is the grain of sand in an hourglass falling from one end into the other, but not at either. Winter is the dark god dressed in black coming to clasp his tight, choking hands on a blade of grass or a maple leaf. Winter, in Michigan, is snow. And thus it snowed. Blinding whiteness stretched as far as the eye could see. Sunlight reflected off the many facets of these crystals of ice, each snowflake like a work of…
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