background preloader

Memoir Samples

Facebook Twitter

Snow Hill Sniper. Back when I was a young boy, there were some woods behind our house and in those woods was a dirt road that led to an abandoned sand quarry, complete with a sloping wall of top soil, which in winter became a pretty big and steep snow hill, for a ten year old anyway.

Snow Hill Sniper

With every fresh snowfall this hill immediately attracted every youngster in the neighborhood, time and time again we would climb up with toboggan in tow, position ourselves at the crest of this marvelous mound of merriment and launch our little bodies down and hope for the best. Now after a few of us had slid down and trudged our way up a dozen times or so, a mound would form at the bottom of the hill to the delight of every little maniac there.

It served us well as a take off ramp. Once again I launched myself downhill steering my somewhat beat up aluminum toboggan and once more flew over the mound, it happened again WHACK! To the back of my head, a cloud of snow around my face. Sample Personal Memoir: What Is She Thinking: A Canyon of Quandaries. Two beautiful, ocean-blue eyes stared blankly from behind scratchproof lenses.

Sample Personal Memoir: What Is She Thinking: A Canyon of Quandaries

Her mouth gaped, and the sauce from the breadsticks she ate moments beforehand stained the corners of her mouth. Her facial muscles slacked and her shoulders slumped. Her mind had retreated to that special place, her face utilizing its shield, guarding her private thoughts. Over the years, I watched my daughter grow from a premature infant into an immature teen. I sat in the far corner of the room, watching Kali and thought, What could I have done?

Born six weeks early on an unseasonably warm winter day, Kali triumphed, insisting her right to exist. I remember the joy and the feeling of pride. Alarms rang inside my head as the time neared and passed for each milestone, eventually achieved, but much later than the norm. Day oneunsatisfactory behavior. How could this be? In spite of all the evidence, unwilling to accept my daughters fate, I sought the advice of numerous health professionals and specialists. Swimming Underwater with John. Swimming Underwater with John by Allison Lindsay Shea age: 17 Beach houses always have massive windows that make clear how intricate the sky can be, not on days when all the clouds have dissipated, but on days when there are so many scaly clouds that the sky looks sort of like it’s covered with big fleshy mushrooms.

Swimming Underwater with John

On other days the sky is flat and sifting in grays; the colors mesh so fantastically slowly, like gases on the Earth when it was new and yawning back and forth. On those days the sky looks like a primordial soup from which a wriggling prokaryote could come and move pathologically across huge stretches of sky. Right now, my little brother John is floating around in the pool (of the beach house we rent every summer and sometimes at Christmas), with his t-shirt pulled up over his head so that his face is completely covered and he is shaped like a little mountain.

John likes to be in the water, because when the water covers all of you, it fills you in like gelatin. Student Sample 1. Student Sample 2.