My mother’s eyes still well with tears when she remembers the day I disappeared. She’d left me playing on the swing in our yard, but when she looked out the window a few minutes later, the yard was empty and I was nowhere to be seen. Mom feared the worst. Even though traffic hadn’t yet reached today’s febrile pace, the city street we lived on back then was a busy one, and I was only three years old. The story ended happily, however. My mother found me just down the block, safe and sound. I was triumphant. I’d made my first solo journey, venturing deep into unknown territory. The boundaries of my world had expanded. And I had a squirrel to thank for it. When he left our yard to return to the tall oak he called home, I’d simply tagged along, and I still had him in my eye when my mother caught up with me. The squirrel was watching me, too, from the safety of a high branch. I can remember wondering what else he could see from his lofty perch, and I was determined to join him. But I hadn’t yet figured out how to climb up. That’s when my mother intervened, with predictable results.

Even so, a smarting backside was a small price to pay for this first taste of freedom. And my mother’s anger was fleeting. She recognized something of her own restless yearning for new horizons in my brief escape. After all, her father was happiest when he was guiding parties of hunters and fishermen into the wilder corners of the Adirondacks. His daughter soon caught the bug. She, too, found the constraints of city life hard to bear, and she wasn’t about to clip my wings. So, when my parents left the big city for a small country town nestled against the Green Mountains of Vermont, not long after my flight to freedom, my mother lost little time in passing on what she’d learned from her father. She taught me how to survive in wild country first. More importantly, though, she taught me how to thrive, to savor the pleasures of solitude.

Those lessons stayed with me. And while I’d be the last to shortchange the many joys to be had in good company — let alone deny the safety that comes in numbers — I never tire of solo jaunts. Yet it seems very few women are so minded. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked, “You’re Going ALONE!?”… Read more…

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