Young Writers Project is a creative, online community of teen writers and visual artists that started in Burlington in 2006. Each week, VTDigger publishes the writing and art of young Vermonters who post their work on youngwritersproject.org, a free, interactive website for youth, ages 13-19. To find out more, please go to youngwritersproject.org or contact Executive Director Susan Reid at sreid@youngwritersproject.org; (802) 324-9538.
Summer’s almost here… and with it each day, the world awakens anew: Mornings whistle with the choruses of songbird and cicada as small children tumble over newly clover-covered lawns; the leaves of nascent flowerbeds stretch luxuriously toward the sun as it rises in a cerulean sky. With a laugh-laden fervor, this week’s featured writer, Sela Morgenstein Fuerst of South Burlington, reflects on an early-summer daybreak that brought light and delight.
Perfumed lilacs and high-fiving trees
Sela Morgenstein Fuerst, 11, South Burlington
Today was the first time I’ve gone biking in the morning — the proper morning, when the sun is light on your shoulders and the neighborhood is waking up, bursting with birdsong and the not-so-harmonious orchestra of barking dogs — and it was wonderful. Actually, don’t take that word’s word for it; nothing can describe how filled I felt wandering the mostly empty streets, feeling as if I were flying. Everything delighted me. Everything made me throw my head back and laugh and breathe so deeply I could smell the earth, the glistening still-wet blades of grass. I pedaled along roads with emerald canopies of pine and oak and who knows what other kinds of trees, and whenever I spied a branch that was just longing to touch the ground, to kiss someone with that faint scent of candle wax and sap, I reached out and touched it, giving it a millisecond of love. I lost count of how many trees I did this to.
Also, the lilacs are in bloom now, and I think they’re making me delirious, because every time I passed a lilac bush or arch, which was every two seconds, because Vermonters love their lilacs, I gathered the cone-shaped delights in my fingertips and took a huge breath, trying to smell their heady perfume. Summer’s almost here, I kept thinking, with an emotional crash of terror and excitement. Summer’s almost here. Come July, I will be a puddle on the floor, too hot (melting actually) to bike in the morning, noon, or afternoon. For now, in May, I will delight in these numerous delights. I will smell the lilacs and delight. Summer’s almost here.
