(In those early years, I feared the unknown. Now I've come to anticipate it. Every day that brings something unexpected is a wonder and a joy to me.)

We came to rest in a small town called Grand Junction (which I understand is now a teeming metropolis and home to an annual Harley festival and numerous wineries). Nestled in a valley, surrounded by mountains, I was aching to explore this new place. As soon as we had unpacked and done all the necessary registering for school, I was off, as fast as my feet could go, to discover whatever was waiting for me.

My father, an avid sportsman, soon realized that he had a willing companion in me for his hunting and fishing expeditions. He taught me how to handle a gun, how to bait a hook with what trout REALLY like to eat, how to skin a rabbit and quarter a deer. I was ready to move out into the wilderness and live off the land. Weekends found me hiking up into the mountains, collecting arrowheads and petrified wood, or picking wild asparagus along the irrigation ditches with my mother.

Wonder of wonders, our town had a Girl Scout troop, and I was soon back in uniform, among other girls my age who loved horses and hated boys. My mother became involved in organizing a social club for foreign-born Americans, and there were weekly get- togethers and pot-luck suppers.

I even enjoyed spending time with my 5-year-old brother, building snow forts and having snowball fights, sledding down the hills in airplane-tire inner tubes, ice-skating on the frozen canals, ice fishing, and generally staying out in this wondrous white stuff called snow until we were red-cheeked and frost-bitten.

I found a new best-friend, Claudia, and sleep-overs at my house were filled with laughter that kept my father threatening to toss us out into the snow unless we settled down and went to sleep RIGHT NOW. We collected returnable bottles and cashed them in so we could buy our favorite movie magazines and drool over Paul Petersen and Johnny Crawford. We conjured up daydreams of how we would marry these two Hollywood hunks and live in fabulous mansions next door to each other in California and life would be wonderful and perfect. I didn't have a lot of friends in Colorado, but I had Claudia and life was good.

Thanks to the superior educational system in Florida, I was so far ahead in my classes that I was moved up a grade, and found myself in a class filled with girls who actually had breasts and boys who actually noticed that the girls actually had breasts.

One of the required courses was music, and we were forced to stand in front of our classmates and solo on "God Bless America" so the teacher would know if we were sopranos, altos or tenors. To this day, I won't even sing in the bathtub.

We camped alongside sparkling, silver rivers, my mother and brother sleeping in the back of the station wagon, my father and I in sleeping bags on the ground. We were fishing at daybreak, and the trout went from the hook to the skillet. To this day, I have never tasted anything quite as wonderful as fresh trout caught only minutes before. My father was a partner in a small charter-aircraft business, and we flew to Utah several times for picnics and fishing trips.

I was still in awe of this savage country, so different from the flat, green Florida I had lived in for all of my life. There was no time for boredom, there was always some place that had to be explored, arrowheads and stones to be picked up around every turn. I loved our trips to the canyons and cliffs, red sandstone shimmering in the sunlight. I loved horseback riding in the mountains, and tracking deer with my father. I felt free, alive and free of any constraints - here I could be whatever I wanted. Days, weeks were filled with that intriguing unknown and I loved capturing each moment and making it mine.

There came a day when my father, he of the perpetual sand-in-his-shoes, decided we were going back to Florida. I cried, begging him to leave me there. Sadly, I carefully packed each of the rocks I had collected, my ceramic herd of horses, my memories and my happiness and loaded them into the station wagon.

On the morning of February 14th, Valentine's Day and the day we were heading back to Florida, I awoke with a flowing red present for myself - my first period. My non-existent breasts were aching, and I was doubled over with cramps, positive that I was internally hemorrhaging and was going to die any second. When my mother explained what was happening and outfitted me with the proper accessories to stem the tide, I was embarrassed. "Now you're a woman," she told me, smiling a secret smile reserved for only another woman. I didn't want to be a woman. I wanted to be twelve again, riding horses and having a crush on Paul Petersen. I was aghast when she told me that I would have to go through this messy ordeal every month until I was much, much older. It was bloody and nasty and I hated it. I spent the first leg of our journey huddled miserably in the back of the station wagon, a pillow clutched to my cramping abdomen, crying silently. Goodbye, Colorado, goodbye, childhood.

Living in the After