WHEN I WAS EIGHTEEN

Mary Alice Hostetter

When I was 18, I left home and never looked back. I borrowed my brother’s ’63 Corvair, white with red interior. I loaded it with the few things I wanted to take with me as I left my first eighteen years behind to go to college.

I left behind the clothes that embarrassed me with their differentness—handmade dresses and ill-fitting hand-me-downs, the aprons my mother said would protect those dresses so they’d last longer, as if that was a good thing. Other clothes, the few things I’d bought on my own, I packed in the blue American Tourister suitcase my oldest brother had given me for high school graduation. Later, when I had access to television, I would see that it was the suitcase they showed being dropped from airplanes and landing undamaged, the contents intact.

I packed my own checkbook, my high school yearbook, where my friends had covered the pictures with notes recounting all of the wonderful times we had had. Under my picture it said I was "everyone’s friend." I packed my dictionary, a few books, and the Wiss scissors another brother had given me for high school graduation. It seemed an odd gift, but useful, and I have them even now.

The white Corvair purred as I started down the long lane, shifting smoothly into second gear. I did not notice the catalpa trees that lined the edges of the lane. I did not notice the brown tassels on the corn ready for harvest or the soft greens of the alfalfa fields almost ready for the third cutting. I did not look at the tomatoes in the fields, still a few green ones and lots more ripe and ready for picking, tomatoes that would be canned with no help from me. I did not pay attention to the cows coming down the path for milking. It would not be me closing the stable door behind them.

I turned right at the mailboxes onto Denlinger Road. It didn’t seem quite right that the road was named for the other family whose farm was bordered by the road. They had only one child, and there were twelve of us. But, my father said, he had never been involved in politics, and the Denlingers were, so that was that. I did not glance at the road banks where I had picked bluebells and violets for Grandma Denlinger when I was walking back from the bus stop.

I turned left at the bus stop where for all those years I had waited with my brothers and sisters, waited for the bus to come over the crest of the hill. On cold winter mornings it seemed to take forever. I did not think about all those years or about my brothers and sisters. I was leaving.

I went past the chinchilla farm that was now a used car lot. Before the farm was built on a piece of land bought from our neighbor, I had never heard of chinchillas. We went to the open house when they invited the community, because we were curious to see these strange animals. Ours was not a "fur coat" sort of town, so it was not for ours or our neighbor’s coats that they were growing the chinchillas.

I did not even glance at the chinchilla farm or give it a second thought as I drove by. I did not care why it came or why it left. That day I was leaving.

—Mary Alice Hostetter, Charlottesville, Virginia, after a career in teaching and human services, has now chosen to devote more time to her lifelong passion for writing. Among the themes she has explored are reflections on growing up Mennonite in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, during the 1950s and 1960s.