In the winter of 1999, I found myself six months out of college and uncomfortably wedged between adolescence and adulthood. I had returned to my one-stop-light, no-movie-theatre-but-plenty-of-cows hometown. I lived in my former neighbors' house, caring for their spider plants while they wintered in Florida. I had car payments, health insurance, and my first real job – but it seemed at the time that I had regressed back to high school. I lived in a house I did not own or pay for, and would likely not be able to afford for several decades. I ate dinner with my parents on a regular basis; they monitored my comings and goings from a distance of a quarter of a mile. And I was dating, four years too late, the most popular boy in Woodbury High School's class of 1994.