Although grief itself is not hard to understand, the effects of this powerful feeling are often unpredictable. In the book Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan, the main character, Willow Chance, experiences grief after she loses her parents. In her struggles to leave the past behind, she went through many changes. There were two main transitions that had the most notable effect on her: first, when she first moved in with the Nguyens and second, when she and the Nguyens moved to the Gardens of Glenwood. When Willow first came to live with the Nguyens, she was still in shock. Right after she found out that her parents died in a car crash, her brain can barely function, and she loses the ability to talk. Her new friend, Mai Nguyen, decides that Willow couldn’t survive on her own, and decides that her family needs to take Willow in. However, Willow didn’t know that the Nguyens lived in a garage, so when she got to the Nguyens’ residence, she was caught off guard; this added to her shock even more. Had the Nguyens had proper quarters and sufficient resources to properly take care of Willow, she would probably have recovered much sooner. Although Willow’s condition improved in the days after her move to the garage, the symptoms of her grief still showed. She used to be obsessed with medicines and diseases; because of her shock, even when she made interesting medical discoveries, she didn’t speak, and, if she talked at all, she just made a short, blunt statement, like: “Get some rest.” She used to count everything by 7’s; because of her shock, she couldn’t even count anything anymore, because she thought “she didn’t count in this world anymore (as in ‘she didn’t matter to this world anymore’)”. She also became some sort of hermit: she refused to go to school or even leave the garage at all unless she was going to the Nguyen’s family-owned nail salon or the library. However, we begin to see an improvement in Willow’s spirits after she moves to the Gardens of Glenwood. At the Gardens of Glenwood (an apartment complex), Willow began enjoying life. She enjoyed life at the Gardens of Glenwood from the very beginning, in fact, when she cleaned up the apartment building with the Nguyens when they just moved in. She especially enjoyed it when she uses shards of broken glass to decorate a just-cleaned window. Then, she began finding joy in helping others, most notably Dell Duke, a sloppy but compassionate school counselor, and Quang-Ha, the Nguyen brother who at first was very behind in school (mostly because he didn’t care about it), but, with Willow’s help, got impressive homework and test scores and was moved to Honors and AP classes. However, none of these things impacted Willow as much as planting a garden (an actual one!) in the Gardens of Glenwood. Willow thought the Gardens of Glenwood needed a real garden. Despite the name, since it was so hot in the area, no creation of an actual garden had been attempted. Since tending to her garden was one of Willow’s favorite activities in her old life, she thought that planting a garden would be easy. It was not. She attempted to start the garden up by planting dozens of sunflowers in pots and then transferring them to soil later. Although the initial planting worked out, when it came time to transfer the sunflowers to the ground, Willow could not find good soil; the only dirt around was covered with all kinds of filth. Willow decided to sell the lava rocks and tarp covering everything, just for a start. Then, after that was done, they used a Rototiller to till the dirt. However, that night, a powerful wind came and blew the dirt right off the ground, like a mini Dust Bowl. Fortunately, this uncovered more filth, which was washed away by a power sprayer, and, in the end, the had finally gotten to the bottom of the pile: clean, brown soil good for use. But, Willow couldn’t relax too soon, right after she started a mini-nursery on the roof, some maintenance worker through all the plants on the roof into the garbage. But it wasn’t over yet. Henry, a friend of Willow’s and a plant dealer, donated a cherry tree, a few bamboo stalks, and other exotic plants to the garden. After everything was planted, the garden looked much better than Willow had ever imagined. Although it was a tiring ordeal, planting a garden really improved Willow’s spirits. Despite how hard the death of Willow’s parents hit her, she was ultimately able to overcome her grief. However, it was not just by herself, but also many others who worked together tirelessly to secure her future. The famous Roman philosopher and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero once said, “Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief.” Counting by 7s by Holly Goldberg Sloan. Puffin Books, 2013. Buy the book here and support Stone Soup in the process! Have you read this book? Or do you plan on reading it? Let us know in the comments below!
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Saturday Newsletter: March 7, 2020
Your Day to Shine (watercolor)Story Kummer, 12 (St. Louis, MO), published in Stone Soup March 2020 A note from William On behalf of the entire Stone Soup staff I’d like to thank all of you who read our newsletter for doing so. It really means a lot to us that so many of you take the time every weekend to check in with us. Thank you. Wow! What a painting! Story Kummer’s Your Day to Shine is the cover image for the March print issue. For me, this painting is transfixing. Spend some time looking at it. Let yourself relax into the painting and, ideally, let yourself begin to daydream. Use the painting as the staring point for reverie. Dawn is about light. That is true whether it is a foggy dawn—which is very common where I live—or a glorious, radiant dawn like the one that Story memorializes in this painting. Dawn is also about promise. Everything is possible in the morning, when the day is young. What makes Story’s painting so effective is the power of its light and the strongly organized space, with the rolling hills, reminiscent of ocean swells, cut through with an undulating road. The road that will take us to our own shining destiny. Story depicts the sun itself at the center of the yellow-orange-red part of the rainbow spectrum. This is the power position pumping out the light that shifts monochrome night into multicolored day. It is the light that wakes the birds, that warms the air—setting the diurnal insects flying and releasing the rich smells of the day. This would be a powerful painting even without the tower, but for me the tower makes the work much more interesting. It introduces the potential for narrative. Are we setting out from the tower or walking toward it? Does the sun shine on our faces or on our backs? I want you to work with this idea that the new day is a day of infinite potential. You can do it with art or story. Think about what makes dawn the dawn. Choose a bright, glowing morning for your setting or something more subdued, like the foggy dawns so common where I live. Whether you create a drawing, painting, or photograph to be viewed or a story or poem to be read, create something that, like Story’s painting, says something about the new day being one where your viewer or reader will shine like a brilliant morning sun, even if in your work the real sun is obscured by a fog bank or an overcast sky. Now a different note: “William’s Journal,” the story featured in this newsletter, is about war. And its aftermath. Some say that all war is senseless. In this story, Eli Spaulding, the author, doesn’t tell us what the war was about. It is implied that the general, William, and the survivors who live in proximity to the battlefield were the “good guys,” but we don’t actually know anything about the why of this war and thus the suffering it caused. Which raises the question, does it matter? The protagonist’s father was driven insane by an awful battle, with severe consequences for his family, even long after the war ended. As Eli puts it, “He served as a ground soldier and when he came back, he was never the same.” If you have had relatives who have fought in a war, died there, or come back changed, then perhaps something from their story could form the kernel for something you write that might help you and your family process what happened to your loved one, or to those of you who didn’t go to war but still have to deal with very personal consequences. As always, if you love what you create, please use our submission form to upload it to Stone Soup so our editor, Emma Wood, can consider it for publication. Until next week, Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com! Shihoon writes about her dream on the blog this week: unification for Korea. In her words, “I want to get rid of the ceasefire line that is blocking the path from South Korea to North Korea. My dream is studying with the North Korea students and going on a trip to North Korea.” Another post from our resident science fiction expert, Marco. This week, Marco describes a few Cyberpunk derivatives. Want to learn about Dieselpunk, Solarpunk, and more? Click on the link above to read Marco’s post. From Stone Soup February 2020 William’s Journal By Eli Spaulding, 11 (Newark, DE) (Art by Sophia Torres, 12 (Chicago, IL)) “Still nothing?” asks Peter, his nose pointed down at me like a beak. He has an aura of disdain floating around him. Peter is never happy because he’s having a hard time with cancer, and the doctor said that his days are numbered. Leave me alone, I think to myself. I’ve been digging in this hot, dry dirt since five a.m. And I just want to go home. But I just say, “Yep, still nothing.” I have a job at a dig site to find clues from a battle in World War III. My father said that it was one of the bloodiest events in history. He served as a ground soldier and when he came back, he was never the same. He started taking drugs and gambling to buy more drugs. He sold our house to buy more, and we went into poverty. My mother ran away with me when he had sold almost everything we had. She got a job and raised me by herself. And now I have a job at a dig site studying the war that drove my dad insane. It has been a mystery for 18 years now what happened to the soldiers that were here. A storm came through and when it passed, all that was left was mud. The same mud that I am getting paid to dig through for the museum. “You
My Dream
Imagine that your country was divided into two countries. Nobody would like their country becoming split. I am a girl who lives in a small country called Korea, which is beneath China and near Japan. If you see the map, Korea is divided between South Korea, where I live, and North Korea. Korea became independent in 1945 after the thirty-six-year colonization by Japan. When I first learned about Japanese imperialism, I only waited to next learn about Korea’s independence, but what happened was unexpected. The happiness of our independence only lasted a while; then a big unhappiness came. The North and South Korean governments were made, and on June 25th, 1950, the Korean war begun. These days at my school, we are learning about the problem of the division of Korea and the reasons why we should unify. We talked about the countries that unified, like Germany and Vietnam. We compared how the two countries united. Vietnam was united by military force, but Germany was united peacefully. There are problems about being divided. First, because of the partition of Korea, people are always in fear that a war might happen. I also get frightened every time North Korea shoots a nuclear missile for practice. Secondly, the dispersed families from the Korean War can’t go back to their hometown or meet their parents and siblings. Thirdly, Korea is having economic loss. There are lots of natural resources in North Korea, and South Korea has high technology to reach it. The pros of if North Korea and South Korea hold hands together is that we can be free of the fear of war and the dispersed families can see each other. Finally, if the two countries’ resources and technology can be combined, we can make better supplies and inventions. Korea can also develop their traditional culture to inform the world. Therefore, to solve these problems of Korea’s partition, North Korea and South Korea should work hard to live peacefully and become one country. Can the North and South get together right away? South Korea’s economic standard has developed about thirty-two times more than North Korea. Also, because North Korea and South Korea have been divided for sixty-six years, the two nations’ cultures and language changed. We face many challenges in our life that block our goals and dreams. I think that Korea should jump over the obstacle of the differences between North Korea and South Korea. The longer we are separated, the bigger hurdle we’ll have to overcome, and the bigger wound both countries’ peoples will have. I can still remember the day that I did my presentation about my dream in front of the class. I said, “I want to get rid of the ceasefire line that is blocking the path from South Korea to North Korea. My dream is studying with the North Korea students and going on a trip to North Korea.” My teacher patted my head. Smiling, she said, “We will achieve your dream, which is also Korea’s dream. I hope that day comes soon.” Of course, I can’t get rid of the ceasefire line by my self. However, if people who have a dream like mine cooperate, the two countries’ students can study together, and we will be able to go on a trip to North Korea.
