In the new spring green one year, my life cleft in two. The break happened as simply as walking across a brook, wandering through the woods with its gems of trilliums, spring beauties, a woodland carpet of trout lilies. When I tried to return, the brook had swollen into a raging river, thaw-fed, and I would drown if I tried to cross. The roar of the river pounded my ears. On the other side, outside this forest I had wandered into, my parents, in their boxy beige house I had lived in the entire of my 19 years, carried on with their lives.... Read more