Like fist-punch to gut, the realization is sudden and painful. There are four lines allowed to be filled on her daughter’s college application under category: High Schools Attended. Beneath, in finest print: Use separate page and attach to form if more space needed. Stacy smirks sweetly.

“Mama, what do you think? Shall I attach the novel? Abridged or unabridged?” she teases her mother, but the older woman’s face has paled.

How does one travel through days, collecting them into years, solid meaty chunks of lifetime, without gaining some awareness of the direction one’s steps have taken? Road already paved, the mother counts, lips moving. Two, three… the years blur and gel… eight, nine, ten… she feels the rhythmic thump of shame begin in her temples… fourteen, fifteen…

“Oh Lord,” she whispers. Her fingers fly up to massage her temples. “Sixteen schools in twelve years.”

Stacy has already filled in the spaces, ignores the need for any separate but attached pages. Her mother hasn’t the courage yet to peer across her shoulder, past the saving curtain of wheat-yellow hair, to see whether she has chosen the final four or best four – and does it matter. Stacy is not stalled by making such choices. She fidgets, bounces in her chair, quick clips a sliver of flesh from the side of her pink nail between strong teeth. It is not an anxiety, but an ever-present vigor in her that abhors stillness and silence. She is like a healthy young animal. To sit this long over piles of paper makes her twitch like a young deer, sniffing the breeze for a clear direction to run.

Her mother has gone blind. She is unaware of her daughter’s growing impatience. Eyes clouded with a retracing of steps, of years, of sixteen addresses over the twelve years of her daughter’s childhood, adolescence, puberty busting into youthful womanhood. What had happened to the neat little houses with clipped and manicured lawns, white-washed picket fences with twining vines of morning glories bursting open at every daybreak, family wagons and vans parked in the driveways, newspapers curled and rubber-banded, tossed over the fence against the screen door, same centered spot every time, every evening, regular as clockwork?

She hadn’t wanted it. Any of it. There it was: Stacy’s mother, herself just busting into youthful womanhood, child twined like a vine around her leg, face open and uplifted like a morning glory, watching her mother’s face for the rise and fall of every day’s sunrise and sunset. But it was, perhaps, the moon that worked its mystical and ebbing powers upon the young mother while the girlchild slept. The moon – shining a shadowy light, soft, whispering, intoxicating, that brushed across her cheek, settled into the secret coilings of her ear to sing its siren song. Be damned the picket fences. All fences. All boundaries, limits, walls. At night, and all nights, the woman’s thoughts bristled and surged, like wine through her veins, like silvery threads through her dreams.

Holding her sweet-smelling girlchild to her moonlit white breast, both woman and child rocked with the comfort of their secret dreams. Sweet, sweet, soft peachfuzz of the child’s wispy wheat-blonde hair, Mama pressed her lips, cheek, nose to her baby’s warm skin and whispered promises. Tales of faraway lands and grand adventures, glass mountains and golden spells, broken only by the pure of heart. Once upon a time always began with a moonlight-speckled dream, woven with stardust, and always ended happily.

But never in a picket-fenced-in house.

The driveway past that particular house began its steady climb up the glass mountain, and the two of them had been slipping and sliding, skidding and spinning ever since. Sometimes it felt like a roller-coaster ride and sometimes it just felt nauseating.

“Essay,” Stacy said.

Her mother blinked.

“Says I need one. Good God. What about?”

Her mother could feel flame rise in her cheeks. Such an adventure, what had she been thinking, hauling a just budding girlchild from a warm nest to toss her out, toss them both out into far-flung deep and darkened woods like two lost children following a trail of breadcrumbs. Rolls of sleeping bags tied with rope, cardboard box in the back seat of the car filled with the absolutes of a portable kitchen: salt canister with girl holding golf umbrella, pepper ground into chunky flakes, glass jar of red foil-wrapped beef bullion cubes, glass jar of blue foil-wrapped chicken bullion cubes, garlic salt (mixed with herbs), paring knife, can opener, plastic 16-ounce measuring cup, 500 count box wooden matches, two spoons, two forks, two steak knives, mismatched, two blue-speckled tin plates, matching bowls, matching cups, two gallons spring water, canola oil, one pound butter, one loaf unsliced crusty Italian bread, 32-ounce jar crunchy peanut butter, one non-stick frying pan, plastic spatula, one medium pot with cover, large wooden spoon, and a Coleman two-burner camping stove.

“I could even tell you what all the labels looked like. Not just the girl with that damned umbrella, poor child, bigger than she is, but I could describe – ’’

“Mama, you’re not listening. It says no longer than fifteen hundred words. Must be about an experience that changed my life’s direction –’’

Mother stared at daughter. Daughter stared at mother. Sudden spurt of laughter, bubbling, blossoming, blooming, until they boomed with glorious uproar, tears tickling down their cheeks, hiccups catching in their throats. They laughed until the older woman couldn’t stop crying.

Other babies sloshing in little pink tubs, yellow duckies squeaking in their tight-fisted grasp, tearless shampoo for their baby fine curls, and bubble bath in canisters with clown faces. The two of them, having driven all the way to the east coast, turned north, camped by a river running restless to the ocean, and the girlchild waded into the river to play. While other babies popped soap bubbles in smooth, porcelain tubs, her wheat-blonde baby splashed in a cold northeastern coastline river, naked in the sun. A bar of soap lay on a washcloth on a flat rock by the shore. A frog squatted on a rock on the opposite shore, a mottled brown-green, bulging eyes speckled with gold, watching. The girlchild waded over, splashed the frog, made it jump, and screamed with glee.

She had dipped that child into countless rivers, lakes, ponds, streams, even managed both oceans, and a distant sea. Fifteen hundred words? She could write a three-volume novel. The directions of her life had touched every point on the compass, and many degrees between.

Somewhere on that journey, there had been a shifting in focus. Or, perhaps, the lens had always been pointed on the same spot on the always distant and beckoning horizon, but gradually the focus had become sharper, clearer. Somewhere on that horizon, always receding, even as you walked towards it, was Home. Home – with a capital H. The goal of the journey had begun to take a distinctly outlined shape. Even as it appeared to be only a teasing mirage.

Stacy had grown into such a beautiful young almost-woman, that it made her heart ache just to look at her. She brimmed with the exuberance of life. She glowed, as if the source of light, a private little sun, lay hidden inside her. Undeniably, her young life already sparked with color and experience that many adults would not accumulate with decades more than her years. She was an adventure story on slim, tan legs.

But had she ever, would she ever know what it was to come Home?

Sixteen addresses in twelve years… beginning with that one on the road. No address at all, but the car and the canvas of a nightly raised tent for a roof overhead. Most every morning, a new scene to greet at the unzipping of the front door. As part of their bedtime ritual, woman and child traded stories of the day’s adventures, no need for the imaginary tales of storybooks. They were writing their own adventure story, day by day, mile by mile, covering states, crossing borders, leaving their random footprints everywhere their hearts desired.

She was afraid to ask now – did you ever get homesick, baby? Ever long to come home to the same door, same room, same scene out every window? Ever long to open your eyes in the dark without that ever-present millisecond of confusion: where am I now? Where am I?

To have roots. That was the concept. Not just a house to live in – they had had plenty of those, rented, later owned, boxes never quite unpacked, few and cautiously accumulated belongings in a state of constant readiness to once again be re-boxed and moved. What furniture they had was well marked with the dings and dents and scars of their long line of revolving doors. She had to sort through shoeboxes of photographs just to remember them all. Too many to recall without some outside jogging of the memory.

It had never quite occurred to her, until now, faced with this needed accounting of those addresses, what might have been behind this insatiable wanderlust. Was she chasing dreams? Always out-of-reach butterflies? Or was she running away from something? Something she wanted to remain pulverized into less than dust of memory? And pulling her poor hapless child along with her. While she did her own growing up…

Mother suddenly asked daughter: “You ever still think about him? Do you ever… miss him?”

“You mean Dad.” It was a statement, not a question. Simply putting it out to hang on the clothesline of issues, as if they had laundered this particular old rag a thousand times before. They had not.

Had he been hanging on that clothesline all these years that the issue was now so self-evident? But Stacy’s surprise was genuine when her mother’s neck drooped, wilted like a flower stem in sudden chill, and her face crumpled like curled petals. She was muttering apologies, a melded string of “I’m sorry I’m sorry oh I’m so sorry sorry sorry…”

Stacy stared, heard, absorbed, then stood to take a place behind her mother and rub her shoulders. Could feel the muscles knotted and tightened beneath, cords like thick rope. She made comforting noises. She leaned in towards her mother’s ear and said in soft tones medicinal words: “Mama, you don’t have to be. No need.”

Absolution of sins sometimes turns them into water, pours streams and cleansing rivers from eyes, from hearts, until there seems no end to it. The older woman wept while the younger woman leaned her cheek against her lowered head and waited. Her fingers slowly rubbed her mother’s shoulders.

“So sorry… shouldn’t have… no need to… all such madness… and a child needs a stable home… forever new kid on the block… must have been hell…”

Finally Stacy maneuvered herself into her mother’s lap. All eighteen years of her fit, just so.

“Mama?” she said. And waited. For mutterings and apologies and tears and upheavals to subside. For her mother’s body to be still. For her thoughts to quiet enough to listen. “It’s like this,” she said.

More than fifteen hundred words, most of fifteen years marched out of her. All those places, all those unknown faces looking at her, watching her for moments of weakness, hints of fear, signs of submission. All those bedrooms. Pillows, sheets that gathered in the smells of changing air. She would scent the air like a little mouse, nose to the sky, taking it all in – and for how long this time? All those kitchens. All those bathrooms. Like changing motels and always feeling a stranger in her own house. It was hard to always make new pals, oh but harder still to leave those same faces behind later, and yes, yes, that had torn little tears into her heart, sharp, small, fine like paper-cuts. Smarted still, some of them…

And homes, houses, the various apartments, might surprise her mother which were her favorites, which least. Rats in the backroom, beady little eyes, swishing pink tails… did Mama know she left them nuggets of dog food? Sliced chunks of apple? The rented house in the country, pond-mirroring sky just across the street, lilac bush crowding the back, oh how she hated that house. Cow stink in the air, bugs snapping and sizzling around the porch light, dirt road so long and dark without street lights that she felt her young heart near burst with loneliness. Did Mama know Dad came by to see her once in that lonely country cottage? Tracked them down, must have, and he came honking up the gravel driveway, and she ran, nearly tripped, squealing to the car, calling Daaaad! Like he was a Ferris wheel ride and she finally had a ticket. Hugged her hard. Too hard. Too long. Breath, skin, clothes reeking of whiskey. Reddened eyes glazed with stupidity. She could forgive the whiskey. She hated the stupidity. Stepped back, pushed his outstretched hand away, no, no, don’t want this, don’t want you, go away…

Like a wave of washed-new memory, she smelled the age of that same scent, aged over all her years, back from baby days, back long ago to the very beginning of this story. Could be, standing splashing and teasing frogs in a cold northeastern river that ran into the far ocean, that that was the first time she was washed clean. They each had had their demons and beasts and shadowy things to wash away.

“Home,” she hummed, two fingers curling a strand of her mother’s hair. Her mother, unthinking, rocked slightly, letting her eyes close, and hummed along.

They would fill out the applications later that night. Perhaps the next day. Time must be taken to make a careful choice. Pick, sort, compare all the promises, weigh them carefully one against the other. These were choices that could affect a lifetime. Take one turn in the road, and beyond – a thousand dominoes would fall. This one, perhaps, this small Midwestern college with a fine study abroad program might be worth a closer look.