Theater of the Soul

I was pretty much born and raised a city girl for the first 15 years of my life. I grew up in the outskirts of Boston and would have probably been perfectly content to spend the rest of my life in the same atmosphere. After my father died when I was 13, I kind of fell in with the wrong crowd and started really messing up. Drinking and drugging commenced around that time, as well as a few run-ins with the law. I was quickly turning into a heathen and my mother had finally had enough of my shit, so she plucked me out of my comfort zone and moved me to East Bumfuck, Nowhere.

The first few weeks in the new school were HELL. As you can imagine, I was quite pissed off at the entire world and went out of my way to make sure that I didn’t fit in. I didn’t WANT to fit in…I just wanted to go HOME. I felt completely out of my element, which I’m sure was exactly what my mother intended. It worked. I fell in with a decent crowd of friends, including The Ex and my beloved Egomanic, and slowly began changing my ways.

Instead of raising hell at the Mall, my time was spent at the lake. Instead of prowling city streets, I was hiking and camping during the summer…snowmobiling and ice climbing in the winters. The guys had a band that they were trying to get off the ground, so my afterschool time was spent at an old barn, listening and laughing. They tried to teach me to play an instrument…ANY instrument…but I am a lost cause in that area and I soon learned I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket either.

The Ex (who was The Boyfriend at the time) taught me to drive an old 3 speed on the column pick up truck, always reminding me that although the fancy, new automatic Bronco my mom had was nice, I needed to know how to drive anything available in an emergency. I learned to fish and hunt, albeit with a camera rather than a gun. I simply couldn’t bring myself to kill anything, but I learned to shoot guns and rifles, as well as how to clean fish and field dress deer and bear. More than once I heard, “Oh will you STOP being such a pussy! Your hands are WASHABLE, you know” from those that proclaimed to love me.

One of the hardest things I learned was how to be quiet and not feel the need to fill every waking moment with noise. Some of the most memorable times in my life have taken place in silence, in a valley filled with lupins, surrounded by mountains and friends.

There is a defined line between the mountains where I live and the point where larger towns and cities prevail that the locals refer to as “The Notch”. There are few occasions where I willingly venture below that point, but when I do, I can’t wait to get back to the point where the mountains rise up on both sides of me to welcome me HOME.