When I was a kid I saw a TV adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story called "All Summer in a Day" about a bunch of kids who live on Venus, where the sun only shines for one hour every seven years and it rains the rest of the time. They have to stand under sun lamps to get vitamin D, and the only one who remembers what the sun was like is a girl named Margot who was old enough to remember seeing it back on Earth. They learn about the sun in science class, "about how like a lemon it was, and how hot," and then they write about it. Margot's poem goes, "I think the sun is a flower/That blooms for just one hour."* Everyone is jealous of Margot and her poetry and her sun memories, so they lock her in a closet and she totally misses the sunshine. And then she becomes a goth. No she doesn't! Well not in the story anyway, but where else does a sun-starved and misunderstood schoolgirl poet go from there really.
At age 8 I already had some broody turned-inward tendencies, so naturally I was obsessed with this and it remains one of the saddest stories I've ever heard. As good as the adaptation was and as beautifully written as the story is, I'm still not entirely clear on the takeaway and given that it's geared toward children there must be a point. Enjoy the sun while you have it? Don't be a bully because you'll feel kind of bad about breaking someone's spirit later? If you have one great memory just hold it tight as you can in your brain and hope it will keep you warm for the next 14 years?
I guess if you read deeper, arguably much deeper than any child or at least child-me would read into things, it's a starkly drawn parable about the damaging effects of being afraid to hope for things. The part I still trip over is that the one person who did the hoping is the one who gets punished. So it's meant to elicit empathy from kids? I didn't fully develop morally until my mid-twenties, but maybe that's just me.
*This is my final mope about what a cold summer it was, but SERIOUSLY. When are we going to reap the upside of catastrophic climate change? It's barely 50 degrees and it's not even October yet, I'm wearing a thermal, I'm looking Minnesota/feeling Minnesota. When did we move to Venus?
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