knew the truth at twenty-three that my life, or at least a good part of it, was meant to be lived someplace other than the suburbs of Washington, ., where, like most Americans raised on the East Coast, I had grown up as a bona fide suburban child chasing grasshoppers across carpets of green grass and dashing through sprinklers of summer. If my leaving Washington in the mid-eighties had been a case of disliking the area, I would not have returned to live here, as I did in 1998, returned to everything suburban that I knew before: the fiery autumn of the Potomac River charging below the ridge on.
