one of my greatest loves is writing, and that is because at the age of fourteen when due to my mother's remarriage I was ripped away from my own little world and forced into the land of the hot and humid.

Mother had remarried quickly after the divorce, and she and her new man wanted to start afresh in  Florida.

I was taken from the first boy I had ever loved. He was my dreamboat who smelled of English Leather and wore green v-neck sweaters which matched his eyes. I met him in Latin class, and I was dumbfounded when he started paying attention to me.

My self-image was very low. In my eyes I was a pale and skinny girl who wore pointy glasses and white blouses with Peter Pan collars. I was not a talented pianist like my best friend Patty nor a cheerleader like my pal Sally.

I was the girl who lived in the big white house on Bridge Street. I played Barbie dolls in the morning with my younger sister, and I made out behind steamy windshields at night.

My guy became my everything. He was a junior, and I was a freshman. He thought I was cute and smart and funny. And I simply did not believe that a guy like him could see that in a girl like me.

In December we danced to Simon and Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence". During the long winter study halls, we hovered in small group discussing books like John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, and Rachel Carlson's Silent Spring.

That boy could probably have gotten anything he wanted from me, but he was the kind of guy who would never ask. We kissed passionately, and we pressed our young bodies hard against one another's, but he was a smart guy who was going to go to college, and he knew I was his equal. And he knew his limits.

In June after a six month young romance, my mother loaded me and Flower the parakeet and George the dog into her lemon yellow Ford Falcon, and we followed the NEW HUSBAND with the U Haul to Venice, Florida.

I hated everything about it. I hated the sticky heat. I hated lack of shade trees. I hated our new neighborhood in which all of the houses sported a tacky sparkly stucco. Each house was just like the other except for the color of the door and window shutters. Venice Gardens houses had lavender doors, pink doors, lime green doors and so on. The whole scene seemed plastic to me who had come from a northern neighborhood of brick streets, Civil War era huge house in which the windows had the original wavy glass, proper foyers and antique furniture.

I spent the entire summer sequestered behind the door of my new bedroom, reading, making a dictionary of new words and writing letters to an entity I called God.

I was angry as hell, and I rebuffed my mother's attempts to get me out to socialize. She would yell at me from the other side of the door that there was nothing natural about a fourteen year old gal who wanted to sit in her room and read and write all day.

No, I guess it was not natural, and perhaps I did it to spite my  mother who was my opposite in terms of what we showed to the world. In my mind Mom was everything I was not. She was sexy. She could strike up a conversation with anyone anywhere. Men's mouths dropped when she walked by.

And me her shy little violet probably scared her, probably seemed freaky to her- yes, I do believe my mother thought I was a freak.

During the long, hot and lonely days my fourteen year old self developed a respect for her mind, and its abilities to learn.
And during those long, hot and lonely days I found that writing assuaged my hurting heart.

Words became my secret lover.

They take the pain away.