God’s Forgotten Pen Pal

A personal essay by Cassie Wood

"Only the children know what they are looking for." 

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince  

I sat at the park reading Walt Whitman while watching a child sit alone on the swing with no one to push her.

I watched a different girl with her grass-stained knees and Dorito dusted fingers flitter across the grass as she gathered a buttery bouquet. The sun-fallen weeds bunched in her chubby fists. She gave her collection of starbits to her mother, sneezing. "Wow! They're lovely," her mom said, she said she is going to put them in a vase in the kitchen. My kitchen has scab-red roses from Costco. I guess I picked them out too.

I am not nostalgic for childhood innocence. But at one point in my life I exchanged my dad reading The Little Prince to me at bedtime for white noise to drown out my thoughts while I sleep. And I don’t know why.

Awakening from a Winter of Divorce

A personal essay by Julie Newman

After my parents divorced, I feared a long winter. But the storm never came.

When some people hear the word divorce, they think of a thunderstorm. Parents’ voices raised in anger. Kids cowering in the background as they listen to the booms grow louder and watch the lightning flash.

But this wasn’t the case for my parents. For me, the divorce was a snowstorm: falling so quietly and lightly that the reality of what had happened melted before I started to pay attention. The signs were there. In my flowering innocence, my five-year-old self just never considered them.