Essay

A Most Invaluable Gift

             “I don’t pray for you to be happy, but for you to deserve to be happy.”

I was cold. I shivered up in my sheets and peeked out my window into the night. The moon was stone cold, making me shiver even more. I leaned back and my head hit the pillow, and I pulled the blankets over my head. I began to feel dizzy.

"Hi! Nice morning. How are you?" It was a sunny Monday morning in the middle of July. Mom, needing to grab a few things from the store after a morning activity, had stopped at BJ’s before heading home.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm: A Fairy Story is a political allegory symbolizing the Russian Revolution and Joseph Stalin’s totalitarian rule. The story begins on an orderly farm, Manor Farm, owned by a man named Mr. Jones.

“From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is ‘The Daily.’”

It is the summer before my freshman year of high school. I greet the world as one would a new friend. Possibility stretches from all directions, reaching out from my pale skin and dissipating into the cloudless sky.

     The lump in my throat grows slowly as I hang onto a borrowed, too-large gray sweater for dear life. Small portions of golden potatoes and thinly-cut pieces of steak au poivre steam gently on the dinner table.

My grandmother, Savta to me, was born a week after Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” named so due to the amount of glass from broken windows that littered the street following an antisemitic attack in 1938.

I'm from the Land of Smiles, the beautiful country with temples and palaces where monks and royalty live. I'm from a mind of great creativity and words, and a mind of artistry and language. I'm from a household of hurt and love-filled words.

Note to the reader: This essay is meant to accompany the essay that I wrote called Crying on Rocks which is on YWP. 

A Meditation on Snow White, Bullies, and the Beauty of Kindness

 The Vermont general assembly is the legislative body of the state of Vermont.  The legislature is a bicameral legislature which means that there are two groups, the Vermont House of Representatives and the Vermont Senate.&nbsp