Remember that we'll have the usual quiz over this essay, with one of the following questions as your short essay response.
Reading Questions:
* What made her take a gamble on a property in a place she had never seen before that was way outside her price range? Was it something she saw, or was it simply a gamble?
* Related to the above, what made them want to sell it to her? Why her, specifically, a writer without a stable source of income?
* According to this essay, how does age change the way you look at the world? What does she see now in the property that she didn't as a thirty year-old?
* What does she mean when she writes, "age...gently dispels all of our heroic notions" (168)? What "heroic notions" did she have, and what was wrong or misguided about them?
* How did the property allow her to be "still" after a lifetime of roaming? How can a place teach you to do anything, esp. something that you're not used to doing or thinking?
* At the end of the essay, she writes, "How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea what the answer might be" (171). How do you think you can "ask the world" what to do with your life? And how do you hear the answer?
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