If you are thinking of writing memoir...

"My leaving home actually began by going back there, to Greensboro, NC from Mount Holyoke College for the summer of l966. That was when my mother pretty much went off her rocker.

It wasn't really a surprise. Mother had been intermittently mentally ill for years, but since being crazy was considered unacceptable in our house, her problems hadn't been dealt with at all. Mother had "issues" with control, with sex, with emotional intimacy, with a brain that produced too much of some chemicals and not enough of others. Her problems ran rampant nad unacknowledged through my childhood, as my father was too worn down-or didn't know how-to intervene.

I was nineteen that summer, working as a teacher's aid in Head Start, trying to finish growing up. For this, it seemed, my lovely erudite mother raged at me almost nonstop. When she physically attacked my boyfriend, I'd had enough. I took my earnings- thirty bucks in cash, two hundred more in my checkbook, and got on the bus to Houston. I wanted a different life, and Houston seemed as different as I could afford.

A Greyhound bus is a honky-tonk on wheels; a rolling principality where the driver may be king, but if you're quiet the king doesn't care what you're up to. Riding one for 36 hours in the mid-60's was like living the lyrics of a Woody Guthrie song. There I was, Miss Prissy Prep School, with her thirty bucks and her paperback Trollope novel, awash in the smell of fried chicken and dirty diapers and increasingly unwashed people. I stared out the window and watched the South's underbelly roll by with its shacks and cotton fields, live oaks and bayous. This, finally, was my life.

The fifteen year old boy beside me was on his way to Mississippi for reasons he didn't want to talk about. Because he hadn't had the ritualized social dance drilled into him that I'd had drilled into me, he assumed people sitting next to each other on a bus were friends. And so we were, talking about our short lives as the dingy bus stations came and went.

That boy was the first person I told about my mother. He seemed to think no less of me for either having such a parent or for leaving her behind, but he did insist I phone home from Spartanburg so that my folks-imperfect as they were- wouldn't worry more than was unavoidable. When I ran short of cash just before he got off the bus, he lent me ten dollars. I wrote down his address and promised to send him the money.

With no seatmate to distract me, I crossed the Mississippi with my nose stuck to the window. It stayed there through Louisiana and beyond, while Trollope lay neglected in my lap. Why read when I could watch East Texas roll by?

Freedom's just another word for no pretensions left to lose. I got off the bus in Houston at midnight and checked into the cheap hotel across the street. My first job was a lunch-counter waitress. No one there cared that I spoke French or could discuss "Paradise Lost"; they just wanted their eggs...."

Maybe this is what we get in life, a few great loves: loves that return us to ourselves when we need it most. And maybe some of those loves aren't people, but places- real and adopted homes- that fill us up with light and energy and hope at moments when we feel especially tired or lost. That is the beauty of love in all its forms. We don't know when or how it is going to save us.

"...the first salt wind from the east, the first sight of the lighthouse set boldly on its outer rock, the flash of a gull, the waiting procession of seaward-bound firs on an island, made me feel solid and definite again..."

On the morning of the third day, however, when we crossed the bridge at Portsmouth into Maine, my eyes went right to the window and stayed there until Southwest Harbor, where a lobster boat would meet us to take us to Little Cranberry Island, where I'd take off my shirt and shoes and start running along the foot paths that crisscrossed the shoreline fields. Drawing in the smells of the warm hay-grasses, the fishing bait, the firs, the salt, I was already in another gear; my inner horizon had shifted and opened.

"It was the 60's; I considered myself a person of priniciple and art. I occupied buildings, marched for miles, lost friends to Canada and acquaintances to war, got involved in theater. I fell in love with Texas weather's lack of civility, with Houston's sqagger, with tall men who wore big hats.

My daughter, Lizzie, was born in Houston. We moved with her father to Charlottesville, Va., when she was five and she and I stayed there. While she was growing up I like to remind her that before she ever saw Mr. Jefferson's manicured city, she'd been in a hurricane, stared down giant water roaches, slept backstage and protested injustice. I'm happy and proud to say she has grown up unafraid.

Leaving home the way I did didn't fix either me or my life, but it did teach me I didn't have to stay somewhere just because the future somewhere else looked murky- something that was good to know when my first two marriages didn't work. God knows I've had plenty of rough patches since then-bouts with addiction and alcoholism, my own rounds with the family disease of depression-but nothing ever made me regret getting on the Houston bus.

I did my best to keep in touch with my parents, and I visited them occasionally. At the end of my mother's life I was able to take care of her without rancor. By then I suppose I understood we'd both done the best we could. But I put off sending the ten bucks back to that boy on the Houston bus until I finally lost his address. And that I do regret.

Wow! Maybe it is not so much obvious events but rather subtle and powerful shifts in our vision that form our most important personal narrative.