For the last few years, I have been writing a novel based on the true story of 2.5 years of my life as a teenage runaway. I chose to write it as a novel rather than a memoir for a variety of reasons, mainly because I think the story goes beyond my personal experience, and my memory isn’t always accurate enough to justify a memoir, especially when the story I’m telling incorporates details that may or many not have been true in “real life”.

The last third of the novel is set in a commune in southern Vermont, where I actually lived for six months or so before moving to another commune in northern Vermont where I eventually began to ‘grow up’. The time in the first commune was punctuated by a horrible fire that burned it to the ground and killed four young people in the process. In the aftermath of the fire, everyone who was left behind dispersed, and in my real life, I had not heard from anyone who was there since then.

Until…

Out of the blue the other night I got a phone call from a man who knew one of the people killed in the fire. He had been trying to locate me for months, wanting to invite me to a Memorial for the commune and those who died there. We talked for hours, and he told me all kinds of things about people from that era that he has been in touch with. I was absolutely shell-shocked to hear from him, and especially so since many of the people he was talking about were vivid characters in my novel.

Imagining seeing them again, I was suddenly concerned that the details I’d used to describe them might be inaccurate or upsetting. But those concerns were quickly overridden by the excitement of possibly being with these folks again and hearing their stories and thoughts about those times, which were a seminal period in my life, and no doubt theirs. Times that are long gone and yet will always have elements that remain the same. Times that both show how much I have aged and changed, and reveal the timelessness of experiences past.