Jumping the Scratch by Sarah Weeks

Author:Sarah Weeks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-01-15T22:00:00+00:00

SIGHT

SOUND

SMELL

TASTE

TOUCH

Mary Lynne gasped and shot her hand up into the air, but Arthur’s back was to the class as he wrote on the board, so he couldn’t see her. Finally, unable to contain herself, she blurted out, “I know! I know! Those are the five senses.”

“Yes,” Arthur said, putting down the chalk and turning around to face us again. “And they are your five best friends when it comes to descriptive writing. If you’re writing about your grandmother’s kitchen, don’t just tell us what it looks like; use some of your other senses too. Tell us what it smells like when you walk into the room or what the countertop feels like when you run your hand over it. What sound do her shoes make when she walks across the floor to hug you hello? Using as many of your senses as you can will help make your writing come alive.”

He gave us ten minutes to write about our special place. I spent the whole time thinking about my room back in Battle Creek.

I thought about lying in my bed in the dark, talking to Mister. In summertime at night with the windows open it smelled like…cut grass and charcoal from the barbecue grill. Some of the older boys from the neighborhood called out to each other, laughing as they played Capture the Flag in the moonlight. I heard the sound of my parents’ voices downstairs, talking back and forth in the kitchen, water running, and the clinking of dinner dishes being washed. The warm breeze made the curtains pouf out like those skirts ballerinas wear, and crickets made the air buzz. I’d hold my fingers against Mister’s throat and feel him purring steadily like the old treadle sewing machine my mother kept up in the attic. I ticked off the senses on my fingers: one, two, three, four. Which one had I left out? Oh, right: taste. If a room could taste of something, what would mine have tasted of? Chocolate pudding and cinnamon toast, blue raspberry ice pops from the Good Humor truck, and my mother’s lipsticky good-night kisses when she and my father got dressed up and went out to cocktail parties and special anniversary dinners together.

“Okay. Time’s up. Anybody want to volunteer to read what they wrote?” Arthur asked, looking out expectantly over the class sitting before him on the floor.

Mary Lynne was the only one with her hand up.

“How about someone we haven’t heard from yet this morning?” Arthur said, looking around.

Audrey Krouch pulled at her collar and tentatively raised her hand. She had written a description of riding in her father’s car. She said that he always let her sit in the front and pick out the radio stations, and that she liked to look at the maps he kept folded up under the front seat. She said she especially liked the way it smelled like her father inside the car when you first got in. I thought it was pretty good, what she

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