This is Rheta's doing.

I have never felt like I belonged anywhere, with a few exceptions. Maybe rarely with anyone, either. Always slightly out of sorts or step, the world around me one half step to the left of me, it moving one direction, I another, infinitesimally or at miles per hour.

The lone exceptions would be a. our house and yard and pond and 2. Disney, which I’ll explain in another issue.

We moved here when I was 8. I swore an oath that I would buy the house left at 69 Candy Lane when I grew up. At about the same time, at least in my memory, I also sang about the houseboat I would have on Freeman Pond and the sleepovers that would ensue out on the water at the new home. Not realizing yet, not consciously, that my parents’ inclinations did not align with even the most timid child’s adventurous imagination/hopes.

What a mistake it was to make me an only child. (What a mistake in any instance.) Was I naturally painfully shy? Or did I sense my parents’ fears and cottony layers of mental, psychic, psychological, nonpermissive protection and react to all that?

My Mom’s big family had (still does) a cottage on Rushford Lake, which is ... maybe east of Olean. My cousins went there loads. Not me. My Mom had hated it there, and so I had to suffer in a new way. I cannot understand what good they thought they were doing me. I mean, I can, but how could they not have seen what they were stealing from me? How could they have thought I would end up a happy, well-adjusted, full-living person by playing at home by myself?

Granted, I didn’t spend that much time playing alone till we moved from 69 Candy Lane. Maybe they misunderstood what would be available to me friendwise on our new street. They definitely underestimated my shyness, whatever its cause. You can’t be a shy only child and live in a neighborhood where the more-spread-out kids all go to the public school while you go to the tiny private Catholic school and find a way to fit in. It does not happen. No amount of dance lessons or summer tennis lessons where other girls relentlessly flirted with the instructor or years of Girl Scouts -- especially when you do not let the child go camping -- will change that.

So, yes, definitely, take her away from the summers at the lake too, except maybe an afternoon here or there. Yes, please.

Let’s take a look at her, shall we, playing upstairs with her Barbies for hours on end, enacting Tarzan-like scenarios and husband-stealing hussy-secretary notions (the husband always politely resisting). Another look shows her hitting a softball around the backyard by herself with her wooden blue baseball bat. Wherever it lands, she walks over, picks it up, and hits it again. Repeat.

Or, see her playing solitaire while watching The Price is Right, Maverick, The Twilight Zone, Star Blazers or Happy Days, or sitting on her bed reading Nancy Drew.

One summer I spent all my time with neighbor Amy Bos. That must’ve been twixt 5th and 6th grades. In 6th Ellen became my best friend, so I finally had an ally.

But in high school and college I spent a LOT of time out in the yard alone, reading, writing, getting tan. I didn’t know how to live my life differently, how to fix it. I was not capable. Peaceful nights here in Ithaca now will make me sigh wistfully for the nights I sat up into the wee hours, again reading and writing, plus watching Letterman, writing down the funniest lines inside the front and back covers of books I was reading, singing and dancing along to Axl in Sweet Child of Mine. And then I remember that the memories are … insubstantial. They’re memories of flights of fancy in my imagination, not of Times with People. No first loves. No first kisses. No sneaking out at night. No awkward fumblings with neighbor boys at 13. No Spin the Bottle. One school ended before we got there; the school that followed was already long past it.

You see? You see the Mark of Loki now? Can you doubt his existence or interference now? Riding roughshod over the connections of my life? My first real true kiss didn’t come till I was 18. EIGHT-EEN. I spent four years then in love with that boy, a boy I did not date, a boy I would have to apologize sincerely to if I ever crossed paths with him again.

Which I sure as hell hope I never do.

So I developed a deep communion and connection with the land of my home in OP. It is still my anchor, the place where I really feel peace and release. Like many people do at the ocean. (Which I always felt, too. Like I was a secret ocean demigoddess or something.) (This could explain the bathroom thing ...) I’m lucky to have it, I know. but what happens when my parents move? Since there are no people to whom those memories are tied? No one I can laugh with as we remember tricking Dad or punching a hole in the wall or the dents we put in the car. It’ll be a longing, a friend lost forever.

My Mother now regrets having made me an only child. She is so close to her own five sisters, and as they age that gets more and more important, I’d hazard to say. My Aunt Pat is still single, but she does have all of them. What will I have? In another 30 years will my cousins come back around and pull me back into their own nuclear folds again, the way we were in the early 1990s? I could get lucky and marry into a close, medium-sized or big family. But what if I don’t? What if I marry another only? What if this greatest fear of mine continues to come true and I am alone for the rest of my life?

What happens to me if I get cancer, like my Aunt Katie? And I have no sisters to hold my hand?

Where do I belong?

I returned to NYS because I felt its pull. Sometimes you have to leave a place to find out that you belong there. But I have never felt like I belonged in the very city I grew up in, not like That. Not like You Might. Whether it’s my parents’ overprotective fault or not, what do I do?

Where do I belong?