By Suzanne Strempek Shea

She was pounding on my door again.

“Flower!”

I came to Portland from a Massachusetts village where we never locked doors or anything. But now I was living in a city, because that’s where art schools are, including mine. I’d graduated high school and soon would be an adult, whether I knew how to do that or not. In that Bicentennial year, I was declaring my own independence, though an army of one. My parents let me come here yet phoned weekly to warn about crooks and perverts and remind me I didn’t know how to live in a city.

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