I didn’t have to conjure the setting for my novel, Every Moment Since. It’s been with me since I was a child and my family and I moved out to “the country”—which is what we called the outskirts of the larger city we lived in. We moved to a ranch-style house set on five acres, with a pasture and a barn, a rabbit hutch, and an expanse of land beyond our property to explore. It was a normal thing for my father and I to saddle the horses and ride on a Saturday afternoon. My pony’s name was Sugar, and she spooked easily.
It stayed that way for a while. Living in a place not far from civilization, yet close enough to get to it if you needed to, was a good way to grow up. My brother and I roamed all over, building dams in the creek that ran across the back of our property and inventing imaginative games. It was mostly just the two of us, there were no neighbors to speak of, at least not ones that could be playmates. I’m convinced that was a key element of what made me a writer—a lot of solitude, a lot of imagination.
And then change began to creep in. A neighborhood went in up by the fork in the road just up from our house. It was an “executive collection” style neighborhood, built to appeal to the young families being transferred from places like New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Now, the houses probably seem modest, but back then they were considered big and luxurious.
There was a farm that was sort of the centerpiece of all the land around us—a big sweeping place with a long drive leading to a quintessential southern farmhouse, flanked by a caretaker’s cottage that sat off to the side, with fields in front and behind featuring crops that, in my memory, seemed to change from season to season. Then one day I learned that the farm was being sold. I don’t remember why, but I remember knowing that, with the sale, more change was coming, harder and faster than ever. With an inevitable sense of foreboding, I sensed that the place I called home would not be the same very much longer. And I was right.
The last time I was in my hometown I went back to the place where that farm once stood. It is now the site of hundreds and hundreds of townhome-style condos. The fork in front of it is a major intersection. But the neighborhood of executive-collection home remains. The home I grew up in is gone. Years ago developers picked it up and moved it off the land so they could build even more condos in the place where I once carved new paths in the woods, witnessed a calf being born, pretended I was Laura Ingalls Wilder.
You might say it is all gone. Except. It lives again in my latest novel, Every Moment Since. With the aid of that imagination I once relied so heavily on, I brought it all back to life on the page: The two boys riding their bikes over from the new neighborhood, their mother wondering if they’ll be ok in the dark. The young man living in that cottage next door to the big farmhouse, annoyed at the sounds of children trespassing in the fields out front, a little girl who just moved in, wondering if she can join the kids who are playing in the empty fields. They are all there, in a place I may not can return to physically. But I did, in my mind. I hope I’ve done it justice and I hope that, in some way, it reminds you, also, of home.
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