Personal Terrain?

My name is Nicole. I am from the east coast. To be more specific, I was born in Southern Maryland, in a hospital on Andrews Air Force Base.
I’ve lived in the same neighborhood, on the same street, in the same house for about 18 years. The house is only a year older than I am. Funny, for all that time I’ve spent there I don’t have any normal pictures of it.
Not having many plain pictures of my neighborhood was something I started to regret when they tore down the old water tower at the end of my development. They replaced it with a more modern version, but it just doesn’t feel the same. Our water tower had character. It was the only one in the area that looked the way it did, and it was something that everyone knew. If you said “by the water tower,” everyone instantly knew what you were talking about. My town is what you could consider a suburb. It’s a small place called Accokeek that some people who live ten minutes down the road don’t know exist. At some point, I got so used to people telling me how small my town was that I believed it was smaller than it actually is. Until driving through it one day, I had forgotten about the park and the tennis courts, the fire department, the post office, and the handgun factory. There was an entire stretch of highway that I had thought was in the next county over, since I live about 3 minutes drive from the ‘Welcome to Charles County’ sign. Now when people say that I live in the middle of nowhere, I correct them with either, “Its not the middle of nowhere, we have a Starbucks and a Subway now,” or “No, its adjacent to that.”
You might be thinking, “How do you forget you have a post office?” or one of the other establishments I mentioned. Well…I didn’t get out much. I didn’t really play with the kids in the neighborhood, and I didn’t ride my bike down the street. Not because I couldn’t ride one, which I still can’t (that’s right, I said it.) but because I never really liked going outside. Ever. Even though I have plenty of childhood memories that take place outside, I also remember trying to avoid/get out of being forced to go outside any way I could. “Mom, going outside makes me itch.” (true, actually) “Mom, I think I’m allergic to nature.” (debatable, but unlikely) I suppose I don’t really need to say this, but my relationship with elements of nature during my childhood was rather brief. Unless I wrote a paper on how I hated water and feared drowning and that is why I can’t swim. That is another matter entirely. However, I always thought nature was pretty – through a window. That slowly began to change during my junior year Photography class. Our second assignment during the spring called for –you guessed it- nature photography. I did not want to do it. Surprisingly, I ended up enjoying the assignment a lot. Even taking a walk around my own neighborhood became an entirely different experience with the camera in my hands. I realized that even though I had seen my entire neighborhood before, most of what I had seen was in passing, through the window of my mom or dad’s car. I hadn’t ever willingly walked a significant distance through my own neighborhood. After that, I started taking walks more often. Shorter, definitely, but at least I was outside like my parents always wanted me to be. Stranger still, though I kept insisting that I didn’t like nature, many of my larger and most complimented sculpture works have been of trees. And then trees and nice grass became a staple of what I looked for in a college campus. So naturally, I ended up in the middle of a city. I never expected to miss trees when I left home. Or being able to walk out of my front door and see the moon and stars clearly at night. Though I do feel that somehow I’ll end up finding and/or be taken to all the green spaces in the city, which could partially make up for it. After all, it would just be sad if I went another decade or so taking my surroundings for granted.

But I still don’t like going outside.