The summer before fourth grade we moved to Poughkeepsie, in the historic Hudson River Valley area of New York.  Dad was also an amateur war historian and had the extraordinary capacity to read about an event or an era and then make historical details come alive across the geography that spawned the events.  Amongst a million other nooks and crannies, creeks and mountains, bridges and tunnels, West Point, the Hudson River, the Catskills, the Adirondacks, Ft. Ticonderoga and Lake Champlain all became scenes of childhood time travel.  Land became textured not just with moments, and creatures  but with a context, and a history.

My childhood was still defined by wonder, so books like The Secret Garden and The Borrowers chronicles were my talismans.   Details of the battle of Lake Champlain zoomed through, and zoomed out again.  But all those childhood history teachings went into a mental photograph album.  Later, it would be a simple segue to the historical novels of  Kenneth Roberts, where all the words would have a richness born of a million memories.

My mother had a wonderfully expressive reading voice and had read to me for thousands of childhood hours.  Between the rhythm of her voice in my head,  my father’s historical stories, and the real journeys we took, words in books took on texture, depth and sensory images.   All those adventures brought books to life, gave words a full panoply of  dimensions, spread them across time. New York State, indeed New England will forever hold for me, a depth of beauty that encompasses all senses and all dimensions.

However, Poughkeepsie also began the lifelong schism between the world of woods and animals I had grown up in and the mysterious world of  humans: their likes and dislikes, the differences between inside and outside, belonging, not belonging, observer, participant.  It was there I first experienced  the dichotomy between animals, who always speak the truth and people who don’t.  I lost my innocence in Poughkeepsie when my beautiful, gentle Tippy bit to protect me from taunting aggressive neighborhood boys and they lied him to his death.   My beloved companion of countless forestral  hours, partner in a million fantasies was gone.  It was my first experience, but by no means my last, with justice betrayed.  It was my first experience, but by no means my last, that there is a price to be paid for magic.  And still both justice and magic are worth fighting for.

On a kinder note, the Hudson Valley brought the Mid-Hudson Valley Soccer League and years and years of involvement with soccer, becoming the first woman soccer referee, the first female member of the board, and then the co-founder with Dad, at his tart instigation, of the first girl’s soccer league.  Titusville Road was the farm, and the apple orchard, the pond at the hill, and the pond in the pines,  tobogganing, skating, skiing, exploring by bicycle, and the pool in the backyard, the torture of youth group, surviving junior high, and not high school and the refuge of Vassar.

I loved Vassar for many reasons before I ever went there.  I met the libarary doing my high school senior thesis and have never fallen out of love with that whimsical, beautiful building.  The grounds entranced me at once, and still provide refuge.  Many of my classes have faded, but I still know personally the vast majority of her trees.  I walk them like a lover doing inventory of a beloved’s face.

Graduation 1975, A.B. in Biology and Russian.

Onward to Mid-Hudson Valley Legal Services, and further discoveries in the world of harm and justice, the fascination of the puzzle of law, its power for good and evil.  Society’s puzzle of boundaries and limitations, their origin, their enforcement, their evolution and development.

I followed the siren’s call of justice onward to law school, to San Diego, marriage, boats, and dolphins.  Buffleheads, and the bay soothed my soul after the shocking death of my Dad in a car accident.  I came to know life as water, tides, currents, waves and wind.  Phosphorescent algae and pelicans rising from their diving patterns like a glimmering Phoenix.  Baja and shells like sculptures.  Beaches and the pound of sand underneath my feet.  Living on a boat in the bay, driving in a hurricane, paddling against storm seas.  Mornings after storms, the pungent aroma of ocean, and the soft lap of gentle bay sounds against the boat’s hull.  1981, graduation, the bar exam, and admission to the practice of law.