Fifteen Gifts – Day Two

(For an explanation of this project, click here.)

Turns out, that nut I was referring to last time is the Brazilian nut. Also, it takes anywhere from 10 to 30 years to produce a crop. Could be year eleven, fifteen, could be year twenty-eight when that thing is ripe for the picking. (Picking? Do you pick a Brazilian nut?) Once you pick it, it’s fourteen months before you can eat it. That’s a lot of time – a lot of uncertainty – providing for a thing, giving it what it needs to grow. Seems to me you have to have a lot of faith that something you’re doing is right and something good will happen at some point in time (though you may never know).

My new friend told me this about the Brazilian nut. She handed me a beautiful white box filled with chocolates and mixed nuts just before I went to class. “Did you know,” she told me, “that their shell is nuclear?” I told her I did not know this and she said, “Yes, and they aren’t allowed into Germany with their shells.”

“Interesting,” I told her, holding the box she gave me and thinking about the sort of damage that is caused when we hold on to what is inside of us because we are afraid to give it away.

“But you know,” she continued, “what’s inside provides a lot of nutrients. There’s a lot of good stuff inside.”

“You have to break the shell,” I said.

“You have to break the shell,” she smiled.

I gave her a hug. I don’t hug people. I’m not a hugger, and I’d prefer not to do it ever, but I hugged her.

Today in class I passed back everything they’ve written so far in the quarter. We are studying Creative Nonfiction and today marked the beginning of a huge project I’m going to walk the 8th graders through. They are to create a Creative Nonfiction scrapbook with 10 samples of writing. Hundreds of papers were passed back today (they’ve done a lot of writing), but one kid, a worried look on his face says, “Mrs. Feyen, I’ve lost everything.” He has papers everywhere: on his desk, on the floor, strewn over his backpack. I kneel down next to his desk, and every time I do this in class I wonder a little bit about washing feet on Maundy Thursday. I pick up a stack of papers. I show him what he hasn’t lost. “You have a lot of good writing here,” I tell him. He smiles and I can see his face relax. Not too much has been lost.

Another boy, one who is maybe three feet taller than me and who does a perfect impression of Chewbacca at the most inconvenient times (but really, when is it a good time to sound like Chewbacca in English class?), wrote a persuasive argument about social media and video games. It is articulate and thoughtful and I’m proud of him. I tell him that when I hand him the paper. I have to sort of yell it because it’s so loud in my classroom, but he hears me and nods. It’s a shocked, sort of, are you sure you’re talking about me nod. He looks closely at his paper and I wonder if he’s making sure he’s the one who wrote it. He is.

When the papers are all passed back and I’ve explained the project, I have them take out a piece of notebook paper. “Before you begin to revise what you’ve written,” I tell them, “I want you to write one more piece for me.”

I tell them that Creative Nonfiction is about handling the truth, and sometimes that means wondering about the truth. Today, I want them to wonder about the truth, and I have them write a letter to their future selves. Specifically, April 2017, when they’re almost finished with their Freshman year.

“What do you want to tell yourself? What do you hope? What do you wonder about? What do you want to accomplish?” I tell them I will mail them the letter a year from now. It’s what my 8th grade English teacher did for me, and reading it my Freshman year was weird and sweet and sort of like being haunted by a friendly, scared ghost. A ghost with no shell, just a whisper of what she wanted to become when she walked into that great, big school not sure if she was ready to do more of the work of figuring herself out.

They write and they are so quiet wondering about the truth of the future. I sit down at my desk and wait.