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137 13 Entering Kauke Hall June 1998: I am ready to be back in Wooster, but my return from New York leaves me estranged. To reground myself, I walk each day through neighborhoods around the college campus, circling old territories. Apart from research leaves spent in cities elsewhere, I have lived here for the past twenty-two years: it is home, but I need to think about how I belong. No doubt my stay in New York has prompted a new rupture in my sense of place as well as in my sense of who I am. And yet, walking through the old neighborhood today, I do not focus on the contrast; I try instead to reenter my early life here with my daughters, to find again that young mother seeking her unknown future. The quirky details I encounter on these familiar paths draw me back, not through big memories, but through small ones, rising with unexpected force. I approach our first house circuitously. Four blocks from the college, this is where my daughters and I lived during our first two years here as we began to forge our new life. I had claimed it as home almost immediately upon getting the job offer at the College of Wooster: 1976 and I was ready to push forward. Now I come upon this house with a shock of recognition. The tree that Kara brought home from first grade on Arbor Day, our second year in Wooster, still stands sentinel in front of the house, though it is now dead; the brick sidewalk is barely visible, overgrown with grass. The porches are the same, the front porch where I so often sat to read or dawdle with the girls and the quirky little back porch from which Eileen and I watched a one-and-a half-year-old Adriane—ignoring the slippery leather soles of her high-top white baby shoes and scrambling up the jungle gym (now gone) in the backyard during our first weeks of making our home here. There, too, is the yard itself extending all the way to the back alley: I see it surrounded by 138 | A New Life: 1976–1989 the fence that my brother Don helped me put up that first September, but in reality the fence is long since removed. If I were to walk up the side alley, I would pass the green duplex next door, still green, though faded to a pale reminder of its past. I can almost see the tricycles and bicycles that used to gather there and the children playing freely between the two houses. There’s a new garage out back where the two alleys intersect, but the intersection itself is the same, still marking the place where I collided with a motorcycle in 1978, forever throwing out of alignment my one-year-old car, my second car ever and the first that I had ever bought new. And behind the garage, there is no longer an apple orchard where Kara and her next-door friend, Scott, used to play—only a large maple tree that must have also been there in the midst of the scraggly fruit trees. Despite my caution, the ominous weight of events that took place there comes upon me anyway. And one house raises anew the vague sense of nameless danger. At present, I must avoid too close an encounter with this part of the neighborhood: I cannot yet tell you this part of the story. So I turn away, walking on up the street and on past my second house in Wooster, a mere two blocks north of the first one and that much closer to campus. We lived in this house for ten years, the core of our life as a singleparent family. Here, too, is a porch where I used to sit and read, a smaller backyard, the garage that remains from our time in the house. I can spot in back the small shed that acted as a playhouse and even as a quasi-jungle gym for adventurous children who wished to climb up and find ways onto the garage roof. The swing set is gone, rusted into oblivion; the picnic table is gone—it now sits moldering in our current backyard—but I can recall our casual meals and comfortable exchanges around that table. Gone, too, is the giant tractor tire that served as a sandbox in the backyard and the other two trees we planted here on...

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