The Newcomer

I moved around so many times growing up, I got into the habit of never owning more than I could carry.  My main problem was the number of notebooks I had acquired over the years.  I couldn’t keep myself from writing stories and it got to a point that I had one large suitcase full of clothes and one stuffed with a few clothes and all of my notebooks.  It drove my mother crazy that I couldn’t keep my head out of a notebook, but with no other form of entertainment, I wasn’t sure what else to do.  I raided the public libraries for stories and loved she let me spend as much time there as I wanted.  She thought the librarians were free babysitters.   

My mother was an obsessive wanderer and would rather not be tied down to a mortgage and bills.  Instead, we travelled from city to city in our passenger van, parking in different campgrounds when she found a place she liked.  Things got difficult when it came to having an address for enrolling in school, but I never asked mom what she handled this because I never wanted to encourage her to keep moving us around.  I liked the freedom of having a mother who wandered because I was able to see so many different states, but I hated wandering.  I wanted a real house, real friends and to stay in one place longer than a year.  I now knew how to get what I wanted.