is but they know how to pull off even the worst bridesmaids’ dress well. I won’t even start on hair. I have stood at the altar of Southern Hills Baptist Church enough times to know the do’s and dont’s of wedding planning. If the groom is heat sensitive, causing him to be weak in the knees, scheduling the big event in July would not be the best idea. Also, giving the bride strawberries as a snack before the wedding could cause her to walk down the aisle with a conspicuous wet spot on her dress smelling of bleach. As I mentioned earlier, I am still on the hunt for a suitable husband. My mother has spurred that pursuit fervently since my sixteenth birthday. Yet I’ve never really courted anyone seriously enough to consider them a prospect for marriage. While my matrimonial time clock is running out, I’ve reacquainted myself with a young man from my high school years at Southern Hills Baptist Church annual dinner on the ground. There Harrison and I stood face to face over the potato salad rekindling our short lived romance from the junior senior prom. I managed to line up a date with him and although I’m apprehensive, my mother is more excited than a child at Christmas time. She wants me to just go ahead and invite him over for dinner at the house so that she can meet her future son-‐in-‐law. Sydney Heath Grade 9 Silverdale Baptist Academy 7236 Bonny Oaks Drive Chattanooga, TN 37421 Miss Blake My Alphabetic Summer My summer was sweet and shot through with sunshine. The days were drifting and dreamy, and I danced in their drowning divinity. Nights spent knowing nothing about neatness and all about nonsense, how I wished it wouldn’t wind down, wondered what the world would be like without it—the summer. Lasting days of luscious laughter—longing for love, for this loveliness never to lack its luster. Finding freedom, falling into feverish fantasies of fables unfulfilled. Golden glowing gifts of glimmering dust, gently guided to girls and boys basking in the bright beauty of new birth. How I love the curtain closing on school-‐year classes, the chaotic closeness of Heaven; creating captivating memories of magic moments, moving to music with the mindless monsters we become under moonlight. How I do love these little things, tiny trinkets of truth and twinkling tokens of teenage thunder, taking time to talk forever. We volunteered vacant time to be filled with ultraviolet vigor and vivacious smiles of victory. Our academics absent and our essence aching to be alive, we awoke to new adventures — absorbed in them until amber evening. Harbored heartbreak healed by hopeful hours of hushed harmony and hazy happiness, we reveled in rebellion, running on the raw resonance of rhythmic recklessness that was our escape.
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