YC. (Young Chautauqua, Colorado-style)

[By Phoebe Stoye]

 

I guess Young Chautauqua didn't really mean anything to me until I saw a brick.  Let me explain: I was doing Young Chautauqua as a school project, and had chosen Abigail Adams because she was distantly related to me (which I thought was very cool).  And so yes, I liked reading books and watching movies about her, and in them were stories upon stories of a little Abbie slowly turning into a bigger Abigail (like I hoped I would become soon!).  But what was it really like to be her? I remember I watched a movie in which she was waking up before dawn and writing and cleaning, and what really stuck in my mind was that she cleaned the wood floor by scraping a brick on it.  Yes, a brick!  I thought that was the weirdest thing ever.  In fact, it kind of bothered me because the wood seemed to be getting really scratched.

 

Anyway, when the movie was done, I was still sitting on the couch in my family room, thinking about her life.  Then I happened to look over: and what else but a brick was was there, right in front of my eyes!  I walked over and touched one.  Just to imagine that that little stone, that normal, pinkish-reddish block of concrete--to think that Abigail Adams touched a brick just like I was touching a brick!  It took my breath away.  And I understood that my life might seem so different than that English farmgirl's life during the American Revolution, but it was really just the same.  Abigail, like me, probably looked at a normal thing like a brick with no deeper thought until maybe she thought what an odd thing it was to be cleaning the floors with it.  Or maybe, like I had done before that, she never thought a brick was odd.  But I know she did question something that seemed normal at the time:  a king and queen.  And from those questions came something wonderful, the creation of a country.

 

I had not created a country, of course, but I guess I understood what it was to question such a thing as a brick and whatever else seems normal in the present--I could feel, and comprehend, Abigail's troubles.

 

And from this surge of energy, I began to write about her.

 

[To be continued later...]