My “hometown” is the midcoast fishing village of Round Pond. I grew up there. It is a big part of my deepest self because of what it has given me. And that is much.

Growing up in Round Pond taught me how to work, both how to work hard and also how to love the process of work, whether helping at the farm next door or helping my mother with all the chores that a family with six children needed to get done each day. I learned how to honor the steps of work: how to plant and pull carrots at the perfect time, how to hang out laundry on the line and then, when the airy winds had dried it all, fold the clothes into six neat piles for each us, how to cut down a tree and buck it up and split it for the woodstove.

Growing up in Round Pond was where I started writing as a young girl, first in my diary when I wrote letters to Anne Frank after reading of her courage in a book about World War II that I had discovered on the top shelf of our home library, and then later, when I penned secret stories that got longer and longer – stories about Round Pond characters and Round Pond loves and loves-lost and just plain Round Pond life.

Growing up in Round Pond was where my neighbors wrapped their arms around me. Pat and Norma and Jenny trusted me to baby-sit their children into the late summer nights. At the only village restaurant back then, Big Paul Leeman hired me to wash dishes and soon afterwards put me in charge of  the schedule for all of the workers. At the neighborhood school down the road, my teachers – Mrs. Hawkins and Mrs. Day and Mr. Simonds – taught me how to be a learner for life, not just a student needing to pass a test. I also can’t forget my neighbor Anthony, who taught me my first swear words in eighth grade, a valuable lesson in and of itself; boy, were they really bad words!

And growing up in Round Pond was where I found my life’s greatest influence of all: the hundred acres that our house sat on. The fields and woods and the waters around our house – the ponds and streams, the swamps and the ocean –  nurtured my soul’s dependence on the natural world that guided me through some of the biggest decisions of my life and that still sustain me to this day.

Round Pond did it, that hometown of mine, started me on this journey. Gave me life. Gives me life.

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