Two weeks ago I was in New Hampshire. Again. I’d never been to the state until this February, and now I’ve gone on three trips to the North Country. It pulled at me the first time, and I knew it had something to do with the dreams of my younger self. Blanketed evergreens and hidden lakes. Winding roads and maple syrup. This is the land I wanted in my youth. It is the life I tried to create my first go around.
    Picture this: I sleep in half-finished cabins with caulk and insulation peaking out from the gap between the ceiling trusses and the subfloor, with warped bathroom baseboards and iron-stained sinks from where the water drip never stops. I visit houses with plans for garages, gardens, and chicken coops. I talk with people about to buy land and make their dream house their new life. And I get sucked in and think I should do the same. But then I realize that I’ve done it already.
    When I was in eighth grade, I petitioned all four of my parents to go to Farm School. This would be high school--with cattle milking and hay hucking thrown in. It was in Iowa, there would be outhouses, and I could wear Carharts every day. I was convinced I was the next Laura Ingals Wilder/Annie Oakley… until my parents got in my way and sent me to a college-prep Episcopalian school instead.
    As an emancipated woman of 19, I walked away from my upbringing and forged my own version of Farm School. I went for the whole kit: a strawbale house I built, my own version of Manly (my ex-husband, 12 years my senior), even an elderly town doctor. I topped it off by working at Williams Sanoma one holiday season so I could get a price break on the ever important matching crème brulee set and Le Cruset 14-quart roaster. I composted, collected gutter run-off for landscaping, and had a professional window-washing squeegee so as never to spoil the mountain views.
    And then I walked away from all of it.

    New Hampshire is lush this time of year. The vastness of it all pulls at me. Reminds me of what I used to want. Makes me want it again. On the phone, outside of a shop on the main street of North Conway, NH, I told my friend Victoria that maybe I would just chuck it all, move to the northeast, and start a lettuce farm.     
    “Okay, then what?” She said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Let’s put it another way,” she clarified, “how long, exactly, after you started your lettuce farm will you have written a book about lettuce and be on a lettuce tour?”
    
    For the first three years after I graduated from college, I casually omitted I’d even attended an institution of higher learning. Back in college, I’d completed every assignment I’d ever had a week before it was due, and then suddenly I was living in the world of the chilled out mountain people—I was trying to be one of the chilled out mountain people—and I was not going to blow my cover. I was going to make it work.
    Across the mountains from where I was in Estes Park, was Telluride, Colorado. Telluride has the highest rate of divorce in the state—usually due to couples who move there looking to get away from it all and then realize that once away from it all what they really wanted was to be away from each other. Do we all have this fascination with being more remote? Think that it will save us?
    

    I leave New Hampshire and get on a connecting plane in Baltimore. I am surrounded by successful investment bankers with Armani suits. and just like that, I want my own peony crepe ensemble and everything that goes with it. I do not make sense, even to myself. And maybe I am not enough in either of these worlds because I am trying to be in both of these worlds.
    When I started dating again, post-marriage, I had a friend give me advice I’m still not sure I understand. Just because someone likes you, he said, you don’t have to like them. If I can picture myself in a half-finished cabin with an Oscar De La Renta dress in the closet, am I supposed to make that my goal? What if I can picture everything? Then what? The best I can figure out is that it’s time to acknowledge the person on the would-be lettuce tour. That certain things are bound to come with me wherever I go. Besides, a lettuce book is not such a bad idea, really. Most everyone eats it, right?

When I was in sixth grade, I thought being an adult meant you were done. Done with anything tough or complex in friendship, life, love—any of it. My best friend had recently been stolen by an evil girl, the boy I had been going with moved to another school and seemed to have lost my number, and I suddenly sucked at French. My parents, all four of them, in contrast seemed fine. Normal. Done.
    Twenty years later, I get together with long time friends and we look at each other and can’t figure out how we got here. Weather we read “The Second Shift” and are now working it, weather we promised we’d never get divorced and just left our spouses, or if we swore to stave off panty hose and now carry two extra pair in an oversized leather purse. “This,” we say, “This is it?”
    I think back to my time as a kid and my interpretation of my parents as having it easy. What’s clear now is that they just didn’t let me in on the underbelly of their lives: the custody negotiations, promotion pass-ups, potential bankruptcy, fights to stay in the same city with their children, or missed hours of sleep to get in a run or bike ride. My parents just did it all, and didn’t tell me about what if felt like when the all felt like too much.
    Maybe they should have.
    Sure, I appreciate their tenacity. I owe the same in me to them. But, if my mom had turned to me when I was 12 and said, “watch out, it doesn’t get any easier,” might I have been better off?
    Life is about choices, constantly. I’ve given eight shows in five cities in six days and with each stop I meet yet another person who is trying to understand if they have made the right decision to be a teacher/ leave the peace corps/don a suit/have a child. It’s memory lane, accelerated. From out of the crowd comes a friend from kindergarten, summer camp, or college. All long displaced, but suddenly more real than my day-to-day life at home. We stare at each other and want to secretly steal part of each other’s lives.
    In between all of these encounters, I am zipping around the country perusing every airlines version of the sky mall magazine. I’m contemplating THE PERSONAL BETWEEN THE SHEETS BED FAN even though I don’t have the other person to warrant needing an independent bed cooling system.  The 150 COUNTRY TRAVEL ADAPTER is a must. So, to, is the PORTABLE PET CHECK IN SCREEN AND WATER MONITOR. (This, surely, would make the reunions with my poodle smoother when I come home.) But when I get to the MARSHMALLOW SHOOTER, and when I think it might come in handy, I know something in the system has broken down.
    Am I trying to prove to myself that I to can do it all without looking like I am doing anything? To whom is this message going out? My poodle over the portable screen? Maybe the beauty of growing older is being able to look at our friends, long lost or current and say, yeah, this is tough, but this is what makes it interesting. That clear, easy track I foresaw as adulthood never existed. Admitting to uncertainly encourages the same in others. I’m odd in that I like this clustering of thoughts and ambitions and realities. I seem to think that only when a friend and I can both say, “what the hell are we doing?”, that the real conversation starts.
    Human life is not prescriptive. That might seem obvious. But I think I am only understanding it now. I think that had to do with making sweeping choices when I was young—job, house, marriage—because if I just set myself on a track I could keep going. But you can never really keep going, or at least I cannot without serious psychological drugs that I am unwilling to take. So instead I get this—a life up tumbling through the skies at 35,000 feet wondering is I should buy bamboo lawn furniture covers for lawn furniture I don’t event have.  And then wondering who does do this, if I should, when I would know if I should, how to know, if knowing would be easier if I moved to Manhattan, if I would understand the word better if I had them, if I would understand myself better, if… and then I land back on the ground.

I got married young. Back then, I would have never admitted I was young—back then I was 21 and had it figured out. Back then is nothing like now. Now it’s ten years later, I’m single, I’m dating, I’m changing my career, and nothing is figured out.
    Does anyone have it figured out?
    The driving conversation we all seem to be having it what we are missing. What we lost of ourselves along the way. Take math. I used to love it. I used to calculate parabolic equations with abandon and be able to write papers on Shakespeare as well. We all did, in high school. That was when you could do everything, and were supposed to do everything. But that came college, majors, specializations, adulthood. Does that mean I can’t do math anymore? I hope not. But I miss it. I miss the simplicity of looking at a formula and getting to an answer. I miss the quantification of it. But I had to let it go to pursue other things. Because at some point you can’t seem to take it all with you.
    I’m traveling around the country right now talking to people from South Beach to Portland about what they wish they’d held onto. It’s adventure, math, broomball, international awareness, travel, stability. We meet each other across tables and see what we left in the opposite reflection across the shellac.
    I’ve been in my line of work for over a decade, but I don’t feel old enough to have done anything for a decade. (And we’re not even going to talk about the fact that I was with a man who is no longer a part of my life for a similar decade). It seems that it is right at this moment that we all look around and say, “What the hell have I done to my life without my knowing it. What have I given up?” And it seems if we don’t claim it now that we might never get it back.     
    It’s that icky feeling we get when we realize that it’s not all going to be slick. I think I wanted slick, back at 21 when I walked down a dirt aisle on a mountain overlook to join my adult life in the form of marriage. I wanted everything to be packaged as one thing, because without knowing it, I had decided that this would make it all easier. If life had one direction, than I could live it without always wondering what else was out there, what else I should be doing, what else I should know.
    After my parents told me I could do anything (see Free Time below) they would often have to tell me, five days later post meltdown, that I was not supposed to try and do everything all at once. I feel I want to say the same to myself, and others, right now.
    What if things are not lost, but are merely temporarily displaced?    What if they adventure drive that you had at 23, when you hitchhiked through Malaysia, is still there, but taking a break? What if it doesn’t all have to be firing at the same time?
    Right before I got married young I wanted to save the world. I would go to bookstores every four months and stock up on political titles I thought would be good to have read. I plodded through Kissinger’s Diplomacy at age 18. It was not pretty. I abandoned this path, or so it seemed. Because I didn’t absorb any of it, because I had to make room for my other life. But yesterday I spent four hours online looking at the political structure of Ethiopia and how it relates to US foreign policy. The words that would not have stuck three years ago suddenly held traction in my mind. And this made me realize that perhaps I could trust that the things I want, and the things I wanted, might merge again.