Editor’s note: Young Writers Project, a Vermont nonprofit dedicated to helping students write well, will be sharing several exceptional pieces of best student work each week at VTDigger.org for special display over the weekend. We hope you appreciate the young writers’ viewpoints, imagination and experiences. Please let us know what you think.
Ella Staats, a freshman at Burlington High School, says of this story, “It was snowing outside, and in the anticipation of winter I decided to just sit down and write.”
Waiting for Winter
By Ella Staats
[T]he snow collects on the windowsill. I kneel on the edge of my bed and lean my shoulders against the pane, wondering vaguely if maybe it will give way, and send me tumbling down to the sidewalk below. It doesn’t, of course, and my eyes follow the snowflakes as they dance ditzily downward. The sun melted away hours ago, and took my family with it. I’m the one left awake, watching as winter materializes before me.
I untuck my legs and wriggle my feet into the space between the bed and the wall, so my toes are resting on top of the radiator. It’s been snowing all day, and at this rate, we’ll have six inches by morning. It’s time to say goodbye to raking leaves, hello to shoveling snow. It’s time for the squirrels to finish off the last of the Halloween pumpkin and curl up in their burrows, with their tails tucked snugly around their scrawny little bodies. It’s time for hot chocolate in the mornings and flannel sheets at night and evenings spent wrapped in down comforters eating chocolate crinkle cookies, the recipe for which only comes out once a year.
Tomorrow morning my little brother will drag me outside with him, to make the first snowball of the season and have the first icicle fight. My mom will make chocolate chip pancakes. My dad will grumble as he attempts to shovel the snow off the car. Mimi, our cat, will lie slumped under her favorite chair, indignant that the snow has driven away the birds she likes to intimidate.
Right now, though, all is silent. The world understands that now is a time for the snow and me alone, that I take some odd pleasure from watching the trees turn white, the gutters fill with flakes. And so here I sit, quiet, undisturbed, by my bedroom window, welcoming winter’s return.
About YWP
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in 19 newspapers across Vermont and in parts of New Hampshire and on Vermont Public Radio. It runs an online teen writing community, youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: be respectful. It works with teachers in 63 schools who use YWP’s unique, free digital classroom platform and provides many with ongoing professional development mentoring and other teacher training. And it is developing NxN, a writing center at its Burlington headquarters. For more, go to youngwritersproject.org or ywpschools.net.
If you are a youth or you know a youth who is passionate about something and works hard at it, be it building models or flying or playing the drums or climbing cliffs, please contact Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org and tell him something about the youth and how to get in touch with her or him.
