“If I have my books and records, I’ll be all right.” I said with a lopsided smile. I was telling the optimistic side of the story. The pessimistic version was that I cried every night because I couldn’t sleep. In photos the right side of my mouth smiled higher than the left. I tried to look “perky,” because people like “perky.” For a long time I was known as a “bubbly blonde,“ but the bubble burst when I fell into genteel poverty.

Everything will be all right, I chanted as I prepared to leave the place that felt like home. I had no wish to leave. I loved our apartment above a bookstore, the breakfast place across the railroad tracks, and the farmer’s market where we found fresh rhubarb, blackberries, and kale. There was always much to do: we went to the film series at the coffeehouse, ate biscuits and gravy at Noel’s, rode our bikes and hiked in the beautiful state parks.

But would everything be all right when I moved to the city? I made $1,900 a year in the small town and throve. If I were frugal, the new better-paying job in the city might pay my expenses for 10 months of the year. The prospect of taking a second job to eke out a living filled me with gloom.

I’ll be all right, I told everybody.. Yet in a corner of my mind I wondered, Is a professional job so great?

“Couldn’t you go on for a Ph.D. so you can stay here?” one savvy friend asked. She was, I believe, in her tenth year of writing her dissertation.

“Oh, no. I’ve gone to school all my life. Time to get a real job,” I said, smiling.

Sometimes decisions don’t feel like decisions. They become your fate.

As Dylan says: “But don’t think twice, it’s all right.”

That summer my hair inexplicably turned from blond to brown. Is that the equivalent of your hair turning gray overnight?

I remember a time when it was not all right.

I was living with my dad, who, shortly before my 16th birthday, moved in with a woman he was dating. She lived in a very small run-down town, where most of the stores had closed (I’m not even sure there was a grocery store), and people commuted to nearby towns.

Long story short: I didn’t move in with them. They weren’t monsters, but my friends, my school, my whole life were in my hometown. And after a weekend visit to Dad’s new digs, I was horrified by the culture. A boy actually drove a tractor around and around the block because he had a crush on Dad’s girlfriend’s daughter. I was so embarrassed. Ye gods! I felt like Margaret Mead taking notes on a different culture.

And so we parted ways.

Do not imagine that I was homeless. I lived with some good, generous people for a while, then I moved into a bad situation, the less said, the better. One night, I went to the Women’s Center and asked if I could spend the night there. Sure, sure, said the kind young woman who, I think, was the director or the manager. But the narrow room upstairs was bare and uninviting, its furnishings consisting of a second-hand bed and a chest of drawers, nothing else. In the kitchen there was a toaster, a coffee pot, and a refrigerator. It was clearly not a permanent space for living; it was for people passing through. I had thought I might be able to stay there if I did menial work, cleaning, in return for room and board. But I didn’t ask once I saw what the situation was.

Later, I had a similar feeling about the discomfort of hostels. One night, when I was looking for housing in a faraway city, I stayed in a women’s hostel. The door was kept unlocked – and though the neighborhood looked all right, the open-door policy made me nervous. Around midnight, a group of women arrived and conversed till all hours. We all shared one room, and I couldn’t get back to sleep.

I’m a Room-of-One’s-Own sort. And I have always managed to have that room, with the exception of this night at the hostel.

During what I call “my year abroad,” i.e., my year in the big city, I read a lot of Jane Austen. What else does a single woman do? (Or a married one?)

And then, just as it happens in Jane Austen’s books, the man I loved proposed to me. Was he Darcy, or was he Captain Wentworth? I believe he is Captain Wentworth, but I’ll have to ask him…

And so everything was all right, as I had said it would be.