I am the woman who had a croquet party on her front lawn for her 40th birthday.  A lawn that was the length of a football field.  More than twenty oak trees draped their limbs and dropped their seeds there each fall, so we skated on thousands of acorns and I planted zillions of jonquils and frilly daffodils and columbine, because I could.

My husband built me a white picket fence.   With his own hands.   I got a dumptruck full of mulch as my Mother's Day present. 

I had a garden that was the envy of the neighborhood.  I was not stingy.  I gave the fattest tomatoes to my neighbor, grew marigolds and gladiolas and none of the peas that grew on the vine made it to the pot, because they were eaten right from the bush by the kids who played in our yard.

I made my own pasta.  I had three ovens, Corian counters, the most beautiful wallpaper imaginable in the formal dining room and when a waterfall destroyed the entire back of the house because of a leaky roof, I snapped my fingers and got everything fixed.  In a heartbeat.  I was the most super of the "SuperMoms."  I was the Queen of it all.

I could write an entire book about how much I loved that house.  I could write an entire book, just about that house.  It was the coolest house I've ever lived in and I walked away from it because I was afraid.

I am the woman whose husband didn't buy her a wedding ring.   So she bought her own.

I am the woman who sent her only child to boarding school because I knew my little darling would have hopped a freight train to get there if I hadn't acquiesced.  It wasn't because I wanted to get rid or her or because she was bad.

It was the best thing for her.  Her dad and I went through the most brutal of divorces.  I hyperventilated after my two-day deposition.

We moved to a little blue aluminum-sided house on a hill, which wasn't the limestone and slate-roofed home we'd lived in, but it was up on a high hill and we had a pond and there were acres and acres of land across the street in the park and we could toboggan down the snow beneath the willows into oblivion.  My daughter and I.  My little bunny.