Seven Year Time Travel

Tiburon, CA

I went back in time seven years while visiting Tiburon, the place where I began writing Birthmarked. The hills where I used to walk were the same dry gold, and the wind filled my ears with familiar solitude. I had no idea, then, that my life was about to change. I only knew that I liked this new world I was exploring and that it pulled at me in a way that no other writing project ever had before.

Since then, my kids have grown and moved out. I’ve left my teaching job. I’ve published four YA novels and I’m revising my next. My daily life is fundamentally different now from what it was then, but there I was, hiking the same hills, as if time hadn’t passed at all.

I remember a dog was missing then. Blackie. I used to scan for him in the underbrush where the stream ran down.

Around a bend, I met myself walking the other direction, slowly, picking her way down the stones. She seemed thoughtful, calm, untroubled. I would have waved, but she didn’t see me. She couldn’t. She was then, and she had no idea I would exist.