When you know
I was eight, maybe nine, sitting with my back against the crabapple tree on the front lawn, reading a book. The book was My Friend Flicka, a 1941 novel about a ten-year-old boy living on a ranch in Wyoming and his love for a horse. My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Fox, who saw I was eager to read, had given me a list of chapter books to start on.
I fell into the world of that book. I was not a boy, not ten years old, didn’t live on a ranch, and could not have located Wyoming on a map. But I was there. When my mother called me in for lunch, I was jolted back to my life on a suburban street in Nassau County, Long Island. In that moment, although I would not have expressed in this way as a child, I knew. I knew what I wanted to be: a writer, someone who transported others to a different time, a different place, someone who created a seamless world that a reader could inhabit. I knew. When you know, you know.
When I first set foot in Oregon. I stayed in a teepee, then in a tiny, hand-made cabin at a long-established commune out Fall Creek where the folks made dulcimers and gardened in the nude. They had goats and made goats’ milk yogurt and ice cream. There was a toddler who ran around diaperless and peed everywhere.
After a few days, I made my way into Eugene—a town I knew almost nothing about--where I strolled down 13th Avenue. I was walking past the House of Records when I was suddenly struck with this feeling. It was visceral. It was magical. And, although I expressed it to myself as a sentence, it transcended expression. I am home. This is what home feels like. I had never felt that before. I had lived various places in New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and California, some of which I had hated, some of which I had liked, none of which I had loved. But walking down 13th, I knew I had found home. And when you know, you know.
I believe that sometimes we grow into knowledge, we think our way into decisions, we work our way into feelings. And I believe that sometimes we just know. Trusting that is hard and often scary. But wow, when you do, when you can, it is life-changing.
I would love to hear from you, my friends, about moments in our life when you knew. You just knew.