My grandfathers were farmers. My mother's parents had sold the farm in an early medical retirement by the time I was in school. We lived on the same farm that my paternal grandparents lived on when I was born and growing up. My grandfather gave my parents five acres of the farm and they built a small house, settled in and raised a family.
My grandparents raised a large garden, I spent many summer and Autumn days helping in their garden and helping my grandmother with canning and freezing the bounty of the garden. We were surrounded by active farms, dairy, beef, pigs, and chickens. Fields of wheat, corn, and hay. The rhythm of the growing season is embedded in my being. But it was a terribly isolating place to be. The house I grew up in is still over a mile from the nearest paved road. There were few neighbors, and my mother was not the most neighborly person.
When I was in the first grade, the first time around, we lived in Phoenix Arizona for 4 or 5 months. The place left a magical impression on my brain. Changing schools a couple of times during that early stage, was a disaster. I spent another year in the first grade. That experience left me with a fear of failure. A fear that persisted through college, and graduate school, and passing the Bar Exam. I studied harder than most. It was an unhealthy fear that drove me to extremes, but it also resulted in doing well in school. Maybe it is why I still read voraciously.
When I was in the 8th grade, my parents started spending winters in Florida, the first winter in a large planned development north of Tampa named Spring Hill, then after that on the east coast, across the intercoastal waterway from the Space Center in Titusville, Florida. I had a bike, there were two shopping malls in town, I rode to and from school almost all of the time. It was a large town, really not large enough to be a city - more than I could explore in a day.
Those early experiences continue to shape who I am. I greatly respect the countryside, and farms, but I have no desire to live in isolation again. That fear of failure, drove me to study more than most, something that probably continues to drive my professional writing. Those summer days helping my grandmother are the roots of my love of playing in the kitchen and of working with fresh real ingredients.
I have landed a long way from where I started, but where I started shapes who I am here and now.
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