My 13-year-old returns from her travels slightly shifted, changed in a perceptible way. She’s tasted a bit of the world cracked open. The younger sister, she’s now taking steps — err, leaps — into her own life. Who am I, and what do I want to do?

These early summer mornings remind me of my own wanderlust at that age, how as a child our family was happiest on the road. A number of summers, my parents packed up the Jeep, and we drove west from New Hampshire with a vague itinerary and nothing more. Maybe Wyoming, maybe Mexico. Always Colorado.

13 — such an age, such a year. While adult years all blend together — that was my wild twenties, the childbearing thirties, the hard forties — there’s age 13, the year my daughter is a child and began stretching toward not-a-child.

Chicken tending chores, her best friend, ice cream for lunch.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

— Annie Dillard

Hardwick, Vermont