When I picked up May's issue of Teen Ink, I was in a truly bad mood. But then I found "Brush Strokes," and I fell utterly in love with Emily Smith's writing.
     Emily begins, "Today, a friend of mine will have her first child. Today, I visit my grandfather as he slips into oblivion. An entrance and an exit." This startling comparison drew me in, and the author's ability to vary sentence length for the perfect contrast and emotional punch to the stomach really set the tone for the rest of the memoir. "Birth is the canvas," she writes, "death the frame," then poetically and tragically recounts the experience of seeing her grandfather pass away. I cannot pretend to imagine the pain of these moments, or the ability it took to distill such raw experience into clear contrast and gorgeous metaphors. But the author's writing let me take a walk in her shoes, and her intriguing prose kept me reading.
     However, this was not the part that struck me most. Instead, it was her admiration of her grandfather's flaws; the scars that mark his elbow, the wrinkles, the sunken eyes. Rather than shying from them, or discounting their importance, she hits upon an idea that is so denied in today's culture - that signs of age are really signs of a long life well-lived.
     This made me sit back in wonder, because not only did Emily describe loss and life so eloquently, she understood the importance of wrinkles. This seems trivial, but everywhere I look, I am bombarded with messages to tighten, straighten, lose, and, most prevalently, de-wrinkle. It gives me hope that there are people our age who cannot only write prose more emotionally and more eloquently than poetry, but who also understand the beauty of life.