When I was brave

When I was 22, I stood on top of a sand dune in Lithuania and said aloud, "The world belongs to 22-year-olds." I was wearing my only pair of shoes, the only ones I needed. I had friends. I had a train ticket and enough money leftover from a fellowship to cover gritty hostels for a while. I had a job in a new city. No apartment, but a roommate. No health insurance, but a parental safety net. All the freedom in the world -- literally the world -- and almost no responsibility.

I was brave. That was the year, or the next, that I knit myself a dress. I wasn't an accomplished knitter. I didn't have a pattern. I had never done lacework. I didn't know, in fact, that I was doing lacework. But I had a stitch dictionary, a lot of time spent on trains and buses, and a need for a dress to wear to a wedding in France with an English boy I had just kissed. So I made a dress. I finished it a few hours before the early-morning taxi pulled up to take me to the airport.

That was also the year I founded a magazine. With someone else's money, of course, but my own and a friend's sweat and tears. (No blood, although I did grind a bone in my foot into powder while pounding the streets in wooden clogs. Thank god for parents willing to pay for surgery in the American-run hospital.)

I still have the dress. It doesn't fit anymore, but that's not why I get nostalgic when I take it out. I would no more knit a lace dress without a pattern today than I would found a magazine.

I can't pinpoint when bravery -- or foolhardiness - lost out to caution. But there were seeds of it even then. Stories I didn't write, jobs I never believed I would be qualified for, paths I thought were already closed to me. I was learning to sell myself short, but I didn't yet know what I couldn't do.

That sounds maudlin. And I'm not. I wouldn't go back to being 22. I'm just glad I acknowledge how good it was at the time.

What does this have to do with feeding my kids? No idea. Where did all the nostalgia come from? I'm pretty sure I know: Yesterday at the Y I forgot my towel and had to dry off with my shirt. Ah! Good hostel-y times.