When I was little, my favorite book was called The Boxcar Children. In it, a group of four orphaned siblings find an old boxcar in a forest and make it their home. The story captivated me in ways I never imagined and it felt like a call to action for seven year old me to leave my golden cage of My Little Pony bedsheets and return to the forest, return to the time when I was a forager, a hunter. To a time when I was wild.

I didn't want to become an orphan, but the idea of independence and discovering a lost structure and making it my own thrilled me. After I finished the book, I looked for any excuse to storm off in to the woods by our house. I even went so far as to have my Teddy Ruxpin and green blanket I had since birth on standby and ready to go in the heat of the moment. I always imagined going out in a blaze of glory and daydreamed about my final speech, "That's it! Me and Teddy are going to go eat cherries off the tree and cool our milk bottles in a waterfall like the Boxcar kids!" My mom had no idea how close she was to pushing me over the edge as I was one chore too many away from becoming the resourceful, feral child I thought myself to be.

“But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called -- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.”

― Jack London , The Call of the Wild

I never did return to the forest. But this was the beginning of my love affair for everything forgotten and then rediscovered.