Alison: There's No Place Like Home.

I am going back home next week, to southwestern Connecticut. I am homesick not for the place it is now, with its plethora of SUVs and its hamster wheel what’s-everyone-else-doing-that-I-must-be-doing mentality. I miss the world I saw when I was younger.

I miss crisp November days walking for miles through fields, along streams, to Old Mill Pond (on Elia Kazan’s property) or through bogs below the power lines being careful to step on mounds of grass, and avoid the mud, stopping to warming my chilled feet - wearing only thin black waders on below freezing days.

We lived in a 250 year old house back then. I’d come in from my long cold walk to a fire in the living room fireplace - one of three in the house - the Whiffenpoofs and the smell of a roast dinner in the oven.

My mom never did go to college. Instead, she worked in a record store in New Haven selling albums by Gershwin, Artie Shaw, Judy Garland - hoping to be swept off her feet by a Yalie, no doubt.

My parents had a wall of books tucked behind the sofa in the living room. I’d spend many days with my head in a book. My mom liked books about history, biographies, and the occasional book of cartoons. I learned about lust from a book by John Held, Jr. with his commentary on the flapper era with knobby kneed women and men in coonskin coats.

My mother could sew - and loved to. She made me pleated wool skirts, coats, jumpers... I remember a pink gingham shirtwaist dress with a full skirt and lace trim. I felt so pretty and grown up in that dress. There was a fabric store in Southbury, Conn. where I purchased my first incredibly beautiful fabric - Viyella, which is so soft and warm. It had small blue flowers on a cream background. I made an oversized shirt from a Vogue pattern. At the time the saleswoman questioned my need for such a high end fabric but my mom was adamant that I be allowed to create with whatever I wanted.

We lived in a creative home. Mom loved to draw, and we were never without paint, papier mache, play dough. My grandmother was a painter of still lifes and a stern critic of our paintings of the apple blossoms - our yard was full of old apple trees.

I miss the richness that was at my fingertips. The old house, stone walls, lots of climbing trees, weird metal parts buried in the old road that led to some back fields now overgrown with houses.

One warm summer day I sat in Murphy’s fields across the street painting a watercolor of the pastures and hills beyond when I looked up to see I was surrounded by an audience of cows, I never even heard coming. I sat up slowly, softly talking to them, all the while hoping I wouldn’t get crushed by an errant oversized hoof. The painting was ruined by one nastily critical bovine but after a while bored cows moved on.

I miss all that. I miss the tree houses with their flowered curtains; picking raspberries in summer, and cherries in spring. Climbing vines next to our overgrown field. It is in my bones. My childhood is still in my bones - it has shaped my perception of the world, a life entwined around fairy tales by the brothers Grimm. Old copies of Heidi and Little Women were my companions.

It was the romantic life in my mind mixed with the world my mom created for us that I miss so much. The scent of that life will haunt me when I return for just a few days next week.