12. Tell us about the neighborhood that you grew up in and how it helped shape you into the kind of person you are today. (Yale and the University of Chicago)

The branches of the oaks still reach across the small, narrow lane sky-carpeting it with a rich dappling when the sun shines above.   The road, only wide enough for one car at a time, is a dead-end, and our house is the last one on the left.  In fact, there are no houses on the right; instead, there is a steep embankment that rises 100 yards up to a road that parallels my street, Crest Drive.  All the houses are positioned around a deep spring-fed lake.  Summer is the season I identify with most from my childhood and nearly all my deepest connections reside in that season. It is difficult to separate the influence of my family from my neighborhood on who I have become, but certainly my internal landscape has everything to do with that childhood place I called home.

The muggy, warm season in Michigan was filled with shorts, bicycles, horses, swimming, reading, fireflies, and hiding in the deep, over-the-head grass in the vacant lot next door to my house.  Up the embankment was a whole other neighborhood with two grocery stores, a five and dime, pharmacy, ice cream store, gas station, and candy store.  But down on Crest Drive, next to the lake, it was a world unto its own filled with peaceful, lazy days, cool shade, simple adventures, delicious food, and always, the inviting water.  Sometimes I think I spent four to six hours a day playing, swimming, boating, and reading by that lake.

It was an idyllic neighborhood of expansive green lawns, attractive clapboard style houses, tall trees, broad roads and open vistas.  There was peace, quiet, and safety.  It always felt separate from the rest of the city.  I knew every road and house in that neighborhood.  Not only did I walk all around it regularly, I ran through the streets at many different times of day and night.  I didn’t need to see that well, all I needed was to feel the road with my feet.  My heart always knew the way.  I felt no sense of fear or danger, but more as if I was cradled in the arms of a loving embrace.  Whereas my home life often left me bewildered and confused, somehow my neighborhood gave me confidence.

The years swept away before me, and soon I stood on the threshold of a departure that would at first only take me some hundreds of miles away from home, but later one thousand, then two and eventually ten thousand miles away from my lake, my house, my avenues, and all the things that had become so familiar to me over the years of my childhood.

Still, it never left me; only I, it. I still am that boisterous girl who would blast out of the back door of my home, feet flying as I raced down the hill and straight into the lake.  I still relish dripping, fresh watermelon from a nearby farm, and its sweet coolness in my mouth.  I still have the boldness of certainty just as I did when I would announce to my mother and father that I was going for a run at 9:00 at night, though it has tempered with time and experience.  The strength of my heart and legs still propel me forward as they once did over those darkened roads, taking a small chance in order to feel freedom and independence while the wind and night air blows past me.   I still enjoy the magic of fireflies lighting up the night, illuminating a point for the briefest moment and then disappearing into the mysterious dark.  Though at times shadowed with greater uncertainty, I have come to understand both the inspiring and sorrowful complexities of life.

 If a landscape can shape who a person becomes, then my first landscape taught me to yearn for wide open spaces, the rush of water, an infinite view that offered scope for the imagination, and gave me the self-assuredness to go out and find those things wherever I found myself.

A bold, adventurous woman emerged from her neighborhood and went out into the world, but the sweetness of spring and summer remained within her. Now, as she begins to move into the late fall of her life, she draws more heavily on those earlier seasons of hope, renewal, wonder, and the endless possibilities that still awaited her.