Prologue

For most of us, childhood slips away in pieces—often unnoticed.

It happens in the little moments, like when your fourth grader wants to wear nail polish on her actual fingernails. You’ve let her wear it on her toes, so why not her fingers? she wants to know. It’s different, you argue, because people don’t see your feet much, and they’re your feet for God’s sake. Colored toenails don’t make you sexy, you say.

Then she wants to know what “sexy” is. You forgot she has only heard the term in that stupid song her friend played for her because it is fun to dance to. So, to avoid the “sexy” talk, you let her put on the damn nail polish. After all, it’s the color of bubble gum—sparkly bubble gum. It’s just girls playing around, you tell yourself, and, besides, the way she digs around in the wood chips on the playground, it will be mostly chipped off by the end of the day.

So, you give a parcel of her childhood away and let her lacquer over the crescents at the ends of her little fingers. When you later reach for her hand to cross the street in front of school, she pulls away out of fear you’ll smear her newly painted nails, and you feel the sting of tears hit your eyes like a cold wind. You regret your decision, but it’s too late. Your baby girl is a nail-polish-wearing tween and she’s letting go and you are losing her.

I cede this battle and tell myself I’ll be stronger in a couple months when she comes to me with a bottle of polish a shade of red called “Hot Hussy.” Then I will definitely say “No”—I hope.

I’m hanging onto my daughters’ childhoods by their fingernails, because I so cherish my own childhood. I had the perfect conditions to grow up in. I was born into a home with a loving family: an outdoorsman Dad (Frank Edward Cada) to show me how to survive in the natural world, a pioneering mom (Dorothy Ann “Dot” Cada) to show me both the traditional aspects of homemaking (like cooking) and the non-traditional aspects of homemaking (like how to build an actual home), and an adventurous, kind, big brother (Mark Allen Cada) to take my hand and lead me down life’s path.

Not only was the casting of my childhood ideal, but also the setting was straight out of Hollywood. We lived in the foothills, a 30-minute drive outside the Mayberryesque town of Loveland, Colorado. My mom, with a team of workers to carry out the technical aspects of construction, built our four-floor, split-level home from a set of mail-order blueprints. The result of her work is a spacious home with lots of windows, perched like a cubist frog on a bluff overlooking a valley that stretches as far as the eye can see to the north and south. The peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park, including the storied Long’s Peak, command the view from the west-facing deck. In the foreground is an in-ground pool deep enough to cannonball into off the diving board. The pool was enough for our family to be declared “rich” by a particularly outspoken third grader in the red brick school house where Mark and I attended kindergarten through sixth grade.

The view off the back deck was filled with the rocky-ridged foothill that was Mark’s and my playground. Called simply “The Hill,” it provided acres to discover unknowns, build treehouses and forts, and play high-level games of hide and seek. Most evenings near dusk, the elk or deer would arrive and we knew it was time to head down for dinner. Before going in, we would check on our animals—a hutch full of rabbits, a horse in the corral, two dogs at our heels, and a cat disdainfully overseeing it all from the highest rung of the fence.

Inside, we’d warm up by the fireplace during dinner before thundering downstairs to watch TV or play a game of pool. At the end of the day, we would head to our own rooms (mine decorated in pink, my brother’s in blue), although inevitably I’d sneak over to Mark’s for one last rehashing of our day before saying goodnight.

I grew up in a dream that ended in a nightmare from which I’ll never wake up.

Unlike most people, I can say with absolute certainty the day my childhood ended: the last day of January, 1981. I was twelve years old and Mark was fifteen the winter day he took one of my dad’s hunting rifles up on the hill behind our house and ended his life.