"Another April"

   I graduated from college when I was still 21 years old, and  by the time I began teaching I was 22.  I began by teaching  English at the junior high level, and one of my first forays into the short story genre was the works of the author Jesse Stuart, much in academic vogue at the time. He was from Tennessee and wrote about rural life in his home state.  I was not too far removed from my own childhood back then, and felt curiously moved by his narration. Much of his description of the lay of the land and the interactions among family members could have been descriptive of what I recalled about my own grandmother's home and family.
    I introduced my young students to a short story titled "Another April," a narrative that dealt with coming of age combined with the cycle of life. I knew my seventh and eight graders were too young to fully relate to those themes, but from what I perceived as my age vantage, the reality of the subject struck home to me.
     Now I've lived long enough to know that I would be unable to read the words of that story in a classroom situation. The story told has become  too poignantly and achingly true.  Reading it now brings about the same level of heartbreak that I feel when I read Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" or Truman Capote's "Christmas Memory."  Literature is capable  of unlocking  deep and beautiful truths, the meaning of life itself, though a lesson best interpreted through the sheltering  veil of youth.