Examples of Not for College Essays from Years Past

Memoir Essays (a.k.a. Not-for-College Essays)

Two from Former Students

Stories From My Mother

by Amy Carpenter

     Have you eaten potatoes recently? I bet you have. Between mashed potatoes and French fries you’ve probably had at least three servings of potatoes in the past week. My family tends to eat more than that. In my earliest memories I can remember my mother peeling potatoes almost every night for supper. Her thumbs and hands are scarred from cuts and she would give me the carrot peeler to help her. I would stand on the kitchen stool slowly rotating the oblong root, taking off the brown skin and listen to her. Sometimes she would tell me stories about how when she was young, she knew first hand how this vegetable got out of the ground.

     My mother would tell me stories about potato harvesting and my aunts and uncles pass down their experiences to me as well. “It’s a thing of the past now,” says one of my uncles. Labor laws, machinery, outside competition and chemical pesticides have killed the Maine potato economy and the Maine potato harvest. Children no longer get three weeks off of school in mid-September to bring the harvest in. But they used to. My mother and my aunts’ and uncles’ schools started classes in the middle of August while muggy heat and mosquito swarms still dominated the days and nights. But the cold comes quickly in The County and very soon it’s time for the harvest to be gotten in.

      If you were a farm kid, no matter how young, you helped pitch in. My mother started working in the fields at the age of nine for 30 cents a barrel. By her senior year of high school, the amount paid per barrel had only risen 20 cents. At least if you worked on a harvester you got state minimum wage-$3.35 an hour.

One of my aunts tells me, “The one day I worked on a harvester, I felt overwhelmed by the noise and vibration of the machinery and picking potatoes was like a nature walk compared to that.” At least if you worked in the field your greatest danger was a rotten potato in your knee.

      “You could loose a finger on a harvester, working in the pit”, my mom said. No one knew anyone who really had lost a finger but there always was that threat.

      “You wear layers,” my mom says. Undershirt, t-shirt, long-sleeved shirt and sweatshirt and long johns under your jeans but still you shiver in the early morning frost. Girls wore bandanas to hold their hair back, their ears tucked under the dingy paisley print to protect from frostbite. When I was young my mother would tie my hair up in a bandana with the tips of my ears covered when it was cold. She told me that that was how she wore her hair and I was proud to do the same.

      It wasn’t just farmers and farmers' children who harvested. “You could always tell the Townies apart,” my mom laughs. “They couldn’t pick as fast and always came in the morning clean. For us, we couldn’t get a bath until Saturday night and we didn’t have enough clothes to be wearing clean ones everyday.” Every night before dinner the children would wash their faces and hands like they were wearing white gloves and masks above their real identities.

      When you got to the field the field boss was already there. He handed you your tickets, tough pieces of oaktag with a number corresponding to your name, and told you to mark your section. Potato rows were long and you worked across them, not down them. Then you got your basket, a woven wooden one made from brown ash straps. The local Maliseet tribe made these baskets and they held about one fourth of a potato barrel. One Maliseet man brought his entire family every day to the harvesting, all ten children, and he wouldn’t straighten up all day, working furiously for every last cent.

      One of my aunts remembers, “Once in the field there are the smells – earth, decaying tops and diesel fumes from the tractor as it chugs by bringing up the first rows of picking for the day. When we were quite young, our Dad would have chocolate bars tucked in his clothing. As he dug the sections his children were responsible to pick, he would drop a chocolate bar into the row to raise our spirits as we came upon it leaning over our potato baskets.” Only the youngest of the children crawled through the dirt to gather the potatoes. Everyone else bent at the waist and got used to the pain by the second or third day.
      As every barrel was filled and a ticket squeezed underneath the top band the potato truck would drive by, a young man driving, an even younger boy standing on the flatbed operating the hoists and rolling the barrels as they were brought up onto the truck. “One of the boys sang “You Are My Sunshine” to me every time he came around to my section”, my mom recounts. “I turned red every time which is why he kept doing it.”
     And so it went until the crop was in. As it got later in the season my mother remembers crawling inside one of the cedar barrels and pulling another one on top of it to block out the wind. But after all these years, this is what they all remember.

“Autumn leaves… colors bright everywhere…running through the fields. In and out of the trees and up and down the nearby gravel pits. Yelling…screaming…dancing. Weary muscles, bent skeletons, tired, dirty and mashed potatoes for supper.”

These are the stories my aunts and uncles tell me. These are the stories that my mother tells me.

A Day in Spring
by Terri Moody

   When I met you I was had one foot in the door and you were already in, and almost gone. Maybe always wanting an older brother was what attracted me to you and all the crazy things you liked to do, all I know is I do not regret it at all.  I blame it on the mixture of a beautiful spring day, and living in a town like this. How could I say no?
   We met outside and left for that cute little breakfast shop on the boulevard. I got a fruit salad and you got eggs over easy with toast. We had already got caught once, but for some reason we still did not care, it was like there was a magnetic force pulling us outside from the walls of high school and we did not ignore it. I can see us now, walking down Stacy Boulevard to the little beach on the end near Stage Fort Park. The thing about leaving school on an early spring day is you will usually get sunburned because otherwise you have not been in contact with her concentrated rays for at least eight months. I could feel my skin getting hot as we walked down those old stairs to the small beachfront.
     We sat for awhile, not saying anything because we did not have to. The water sparkling in front, the sand a cushion beneath, the sky and time seemed like they would never end. Time felt like it would never end, the sky looked so high above us, and the ocean skyline looked like it was impossible to reach, kind of like the end of the rainbow. Or like how you could never really dig to China no matter how hard you tried.
     As we looked closely at the dark sand, where it became wet. We noticed movement. There were baby rock crabs making their way to ocean. Just like baby turtles would, they scrambled towards the water. I got up to go help some of them to the water's edge, but decided not to because they were so small and there were so many that I would have to step on them if I was to pick some up and walk them down to the water. You were just like these little creatures; you were getting ready to leave your home. I knew that someday soon you would go off into the ocean, and I would be stuck here on the beach. Three years seemed so long.

     It wasn't, and you still come back to the shore.

Three from Brevity (a magazine of short Creative Nonfiction)


Vitamin M
By Jehanne Dubrow
     In the Navy, Vitamin M is the cure for all ailments.  Ship medics prescribe extra-strength Motrin, thousands of milligrams, twice, three times the recommended dosage to treat headaches, hangovers, back pain, stiff necks, fever, carpal tunnel, plantar fasciitis, even acne.  My husband, in his nine years of military service, has adapted easily to the ibuprofen diet.  He believes in the remedy of the stiff upper lip.  When he slices his finger while trying to open a valve, he seals the red line of skin with super glue.   When he slips on the destroyer’s metal deck, he wraps his ankle in duct tape.  He is an engineer, his body a piece of machinery that can be jury-rigged to keep working.  
     On my side of the family, we make an art form of complaint.  Although we no longer speak the mothertongue of Yiddish, we still cherish our infirmities as though they are silver candlesticks smuggled over from the Old Country.  Today, I could hear my mother upstairs, reciting hers:  a sprained wrist, heartburn, eyes scratchy from a night of insomnia.  My father listed his in response.  If I had made the mistake of entering the room then, I would have been interrogated about my own cuts and bruises, had I eaten anything, and wasn’t I looking a little pale. 
     Away from the ship, away from my parents, Jeremy and I try to find a mean between ignoring health and embracing hypochondria.  It is one of the many compromises that marriage has forced on us.   Jeremy has learned to visit the dermatologist, whenever I panic about a dark spot the size of a pinhead, which may appear on his neck one day in August.  And I have learned how to avoid flu season, thinking myself into a stronger, sturdier body, one immune to sneezes and mucus.  I have learned that a brief history of bowel movements does not make for good conversation.
     This evening, after leaving my family’s house, we discuss the possibility of a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.  Two years ago, Jeremy was almost sent to the Middle East, nearly scooped out of his billet—easily as a handful of pills—and deployed on a mission for which Naval officers aren’t trained:  convoy duty in the desert, integrated into what the military calls “ground combat zones.”  Ever since this scare, I have expected another, been certain of it, the way people in my family are certain of cancer.
When we talk about deployments that could happen, Jeremy tells me, “Everything will be fine,” in a low voice, like a doctor reassuring a patient. 
     “If you were to see terrible things,” I demand, “terrible things in war, would you ask for help when you came home?” 
     “Everything will be fine,” Jeremy answers. 
     “What about PTSD?  Would you handle that on your own?”  I say, imagining all the other husbands who, like mine, drip super glue on their abrasions. 
     “Everything will be fine,” Jeremy repeats.
     This is Jeremy’s Vitamin M.   Everything will be fine.   Often I swallow the words he gives me.  They are smooth gel caplets that go down without any problems.  But often I stay up, long after he has fallen asleep in the bed beside me.  I listen to him breathing and watch the intake of air, the long pause of his chest before exhalation.   And I wonder about the speck of movement at the corner of my vision.   Maybe it’s cataracts, I think, or glaucoma.   Blindness.  Or something is coming, still too blurred and distant for me to discern.

The Potato Harvest
By April Monroe
     This is the morning that summer ends. In one hard frost our garden has become an abandoned battlefield, the last vestiges of the living lay stiff and frozen, black wilted zucchini leaves like limp umbrellas stand as pathetic monuments, tattered flags, over what was, only yesterday, a vegetable garden. Potatoes love one heavy frost. It gives them weight and tough skins, and prepares them for the long months in the cellar. But two hard frosts will kill them, so the harvest contains uncertain urgency.
     The seasons change violently here. Summer steals away like a casual lover in the night, and winter finds us like a flood, filling something. It is to be expected. Still, every year that I wake early, instinctively, to harvest the potatoes, I am disillusioned by my garden's easy surrender, the hasty defeat that comes after the long months of my ridiculous labors, bearing them up from seeds.
     Two of my children are babies yet, swaddled in a state of perpetual intoxication, eager to touch, to speak, to wander this mean world, still quick to fall asleep and hard to wake up by accident. But this year, Aspen is standing at the bottom of the stairs when I look up from my shoelaces. I nod my head yes, and she scuttles to find her shoes. She follows me.
     My daughter is seven now, and already I see the ways of women settling on her, the lilt to her hip, the shape of her neck as she turns to look at me, her breath like tiny clouds, the beginning of loveliness in her step.
     Today, the walk to the garden is a long one. All summer it has been a meandering stroll over hot dust and through breeze-bending trees. But today the frost slips up our muslin skirts, seeps into our feet. Winter whispers to us through our summer clothes, and the minutes elongate with every crisp step.
     Once there, we squat in the potato patch and claw the dirt earnestly, prying the potatoes from their solid bed. When one of us unearths a gangly bunch of them, we hold it up to the other before we sever each individual from the thick root that connects them. See here? Evidence that we have grown something. And here, the last to come up, the uterine potatoes we buried in May that sent forth these others. They are all soft black rot now, and when we throw them over the fence, they splat and make a dark stain on the earth.
     Above us, the geese make their annual exodus. It is a bizarre orchestra of avian screams – the sound we have heard all our lives, yet not heard. So together we pause briefly and listen to what passes over us for a moment, before we begin again the work of harvesting potatoes.

Becoming a Sanvicenteña: Five Stages

By Kate Hopper
Stage 1: Fear

      The old highway to San Vicente is nothing more than a dirt road. At the height of the dry season the landscape is leached of color, the road pale as bone. We bump in and out of potholes, my American advisor filling the Peugeot with 400 years of Costa Rican history: the Chorotegan Indians, the Spanish conquistadors, ceramic arts, tourism. Dust billows through the open windows, and I cough, struggle to catch my breath. Against the vinyl seat, my legs are slick with sweat.

Stage 2: Uncertainty

      I stare into the smiling faces of my host family and laugh when I don’t understand their rapid Spanish. “¿Cómo?” I ask, again and again. The youngest boy is thirteen. He watches me eat my rice and beans on the front porch, his dark eyes amused. “What?” I ask, but he shakes his head. After two weeks he finally he tells me: “You are as white as a milk worm.”

Stage 3: Enthusiasm

      Behind the house, Betty fills the mouth of the metal grinder with kernels of wet corn, and I turn the handle, my arm pumping in circles. Strings of dough spill into the wide bowl below, but Betty says, “Más rápido, hija.” Faster, daughter.  I smile and crank the handle as fast as I can. When I’m finished, I sit in the cracked rocking chair, my shoulder aching, and watch as Betty kneads the dough smooth, spinning a handful between her palms until it’s a disk. She rearranges the burning logs until flames engulf the lip of the comal, and when she drops the tortilla into the concave plate, it sizzles loudly. She motions to it with her lips. “Do you want to flip it?” I nod, eager for an opportunity to earn the name hija. But the fire is hot on my face and arms, and I pause too long. Smoke begins to curl from the comal. Betty gently pushes me aside and flips the burning tortilla with her fingertips.       

Stage 4: Withdrawal

     In the late afternoon, I sit on the front porch with a cup of sweetened coffee, hoping for a breeze as I wait for the cañero truck to mark the end of another day. Before I see it, I hear it: the rumble of its diesel engine, the clatter of wood and metal bouncing over pot holes, jostling the men in the tarp-covered cajón. As it drives by, I can’t make out the men’s faces; all I see are hands and arms, disembodied, jutting into the still-hot sun. These appendages are dark and muscled from twelve hours a day slashing tall stalks of sugar cane to the ground. Sometimes as the truck passes, someone raises a finger or two, and I raise my hand in response. But mostly their hands stay where they are, holding tight to the wooden planks, steady against the bucking of the truck.

Stage 5: Understanding

      In the semi-darkness of the dance hall, I sit next to Sara, my host sister. The band has finished its set, and for the next fifteen minutes, the stereo will blare music: salsa, merengue, and piratiado, my favorite. I take a sip of beer, and when I look up, the lead singer of the band is standing before me, arm outstretched, palm open. I have watched this man dance with women between sets in San Lázaro, Guatíl, and Las Pozas. I have watched the way he twirls his partners, floats them across cement dance floors. Tonight, no one else is dancing. I swallow hard and resist the urge to shake my head. I take his hand, and when we step into the middle of the room, I hear a murmur: la gringa. I try to focus on his palm against my lower back, his fingers clasping my own, the old-fashioned music. I have practiced. I am ready when he turns me, our feet forward and back together. And as he spins me around and around, I catch Sara’s eye and smile. She raises her eyebrows and nods approvingly. I recognize faces in the darkness outside, pressed against the chain-link fence. A thumb goes up. Someone yells, “Bravo, Katty!” When I sit back down at the table, I’m beaming. “Now I’m a real sanvicenteña,” I say breathlessly. “Sí,” says Sara. “For now.”