At home – there was astrology, astronomy, tarot, there was the gem & mineral show, there was a renaissance festival (that was the summer I had a fever of 104° and a badly infected eye and I didn’t want to eat anything other than apples and cheese for weeks at a time, I was fifteen) there was a cottage by a lake, there were kayaks, there was Tolkien and Arthurian Legend and the Harry Potter books and movies, there was a trilogy called His Dark Materials, there was everything Marvel, there was A Series of Unfortunate Events and Anne of Green Gables, there was The Daring Book for Girls, there were markers and crayons and pencils and stacks of blank white 8.5″ x 11″ printer paper for doodling, there was a YouTuber called Vi Hart, there was a radio (100.5 FM, 101.3 FM, 93.3 FM), there was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle, there was a library and a playground, there were years of guitar lessons, there were walks by the Erie canal, there were visits to Lake Ontario and the yinyard at Seneca Lake, there was a map of the Finger Lakes on the wall in the kitchen, there were stacks of CDs (Alison Krauss) and later there was an MP3 player (John Hiatt, Mary Chapin Carpenter) there was a movie about geese called Fly Away Home, there was the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Shrek, It’s A Wonderful Life, Scrooge. There were library books by Stephen King, Dean Koontz. The Princess Bride. Bicycles. There were christmas trees. There was a music festival in Trumansburg.

There were pretty rocks in the dirt road across from the house, there was “You Look Like Your Mother” over and over again until I went to a salon for the first time and cut off all my hair so that everyone would stop saying that to me, there were grandparents in a nursing home that smelled like ammonia, there was a bird feeder and binoculars and there was a book about how to identify the birds, there was a park with magnolias and lilacs and steep hills and there was a reservoir.

There was a public market, and once a year there would be a free concert series – band on the bricks, I think it was called. Crowded.

Sometimes we brought folding chairs.