Late one night in my bedroom at the top of the wolf house, I wrote this short essay for a scholarship application to BYU. It's short, to the point, and one of my favorite things I've written. I'm very different than I was when I wrote it, but it's me. Here you go ( :
Every year on the twenty-second of April, my family brings home a tree. On the Earth Day of 1990, my parents brought home me, and planted their oldest child in a Salt Lake apartment. I sent taproots out into the world, and developed within my family’s loving shade. Three years later, I was transplanted to the rich wet soil of Aloha, Oregon.
For five years, I lived and grew in a tiny house on the outskirts of Portland. I learned to sing, to read, and to smell yellow roses in the rain. At six years old, I made friends with the wind and discovered, to my dismay, that I was not the center of the universe. While my father finished his surgical residency at the University of Oregon and my mother taught English at a local college, my two brothers and I branched out into a love of life. In 1998, we returned to Utah, and I grew my first bittersweet fruit in goodbye.
In the next four years, my roots became deeper as I experienced loneliness and discovered that I loved school. Then, one week before seventh grade, a lightning bolt split my heart in two. My Dad left home, and couldn’t tell me when he was coming back.
Miraculously, the divided trunk of my soul did not split. Instead it grew around the hole in my heart, leaving a window. I began to see in other people pain I understood, and in life the beauty I had never before appreciated.
The tree of my heart now has many windows, created by both pain and joy. My branches extend around what I have grown to love: music, friends, challenges to my body and my mind. My roots extend deep into the earth and family that have given me life, anchoring my soul in love and God.
