It’s hard to explain the pull I feel to return.

I wasn’t happy there. It wasn’t just the wildness of adolescence, either—because maybe I was happy then, or, at least: I felt something then, something deep and abiding that I would like to feel again. But even as a little girl, swinging on the red swing set in my back yard, I could hear the kids one neighborhood over, on the other side of the corn field, laughing while they played tag or chase or catch or whatever it is groups of kids play.

I was shy and bookish. I got embarrassed easily, I licked my lips until they were chapped, I liked my ponytails so tight they tugged at my eyes. I had a high forehead and I lived inside of it, dreamy, with flowers and fairies and stories. I didn’t make friends easily and I didn’t go to church very often.

I still remember that listening, the way I would feel torn between delving into a book or just listening to those voices unspooling. Wondering what made them laugh. I didn’t know to name it loneliness. I didn’t know how to adapt, yet, to being odd and shy and bookish, a lover of words who had a hard time speaking.

I still remember the Friday evening in sixth grade, when I walked into the house of my new friend Tiffany, who was popular and had a loud laugh and always had something to say—maybe that was the first time I noticed the sharp divide. Was there something wrong with me that she lived in a big, beautiful house on the east-side hills and had a closetful of Chemin de Fers, while I lived in my average house and had just one pair?

I still remember the loneliness without voices when, in the spring of sixth grade, my new group of friends, Tiffany included, ignored me on the Monday after my birthday party. It was years before I knew the faux pas I had made that caused my banishment: I had shown the movie Cujo at the party. An R-rated movie. A scary movie. Something good girls don’t do.

That feeling I had maybe been born with, which was at first a tiny fragment, sharp-edged but manageable, started accruing. Became, as I grew up in that small town with its snobberies and divisions I couldn’t make sense of, into a heavy, conglomerate thing. Self-doubt and insecurity and loneliness and shame and bewilderment; anger and frustration and envy; unworthiness. I started to see my identity as fully informed by those things, and whenever something else difficult happened, it seemed to confirm my deepest, unsayable fear, which was that everyone else deserved happiness, but I did not.

Why do I feel compelled to return occasionally to that small town?

A decade after I left—and maybe I could absolve myself for marrying so young if I explain it like this: I needed to leave the place I grew up—I met a woman at a writer’s conference, who lived in that small town but had arrived there as an adult. She clarified for me the way I had struggled there, what I hadn’t understood: Springville is a small town based in old Mormon money.

Ah.

It wasn’t enough that actually, my family was old. My paternal line was a part of the original settlers who established the little town in the crook of two mountains.

It was the other two qualifiers: Mormon. Money. Never Mormon enough, of course, and my dad’s blue-collar job at the steel mill certainly didn’t help.

I was never going to matter there.

I can’t explain why it mattered that I didn’t matter. I don’t matter where I live now, which is a larger and less financially divided, less snooty small Utah town, but it doesn’t matter anymore, not mattering. Maybe because I created a life, with a family and a few very dear friends? Maybe because I did the things that mattered to me. Maybe because I learned how to adapt to being odd and shy and bookish, not just adapt but embrace, and I learned how to find words.

I learned to set down that ugly, bulging, mucky stone. It’s still there, of course, but I don’t carry it with me.

I went back to my hometown for holidays. To see my mother, because she still lived there. For family parties and holidays and just to visit. When my Dad was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, before he had to have full-time care, Nathan and Kaleb and I went there every Thursday afternoon to spend time with him. When I drove into and through my hometown, I would remember. Random memories every time, but a flood of them. I felt haunted.

Eventually, my dad passed away and then, eventually, my sisters and I convinced my mother to sell her house—the place we’d all grown up in, with a yard full of flowers curated by my father and with more than one cat and dog buried in its dirt—and move closer to us.

So then almost never went back to Springville. Except for funerals. And planning my mother’s funeral. And dressing her body before she was buried.

But not for the annual parade and carnival. Not for the beautiful mountains. Not for the memories, not for the haunting.

But I still sometimes feel that tug: come back.

I answer this tug on my birthday, when I put on my running clothes and shoes, drive to the canyon between the two mountains, and go running. The return is partly about that canyon, Hobble Creek, where my grandparents sometimes rode horses, where all the Allman families, perhaps, going all the way back to the 1850s, went for picnics or for hunting or maybe, like me, to hear the rush of the water in the creek and to see the light on new leaves in spring or auburn in fall.  The canyon I would drive in as a teenager, in my 70s muscle car, when I couldn’t face going to school. The canyon with a golf course where, one early spring, the boy I was dating shoved me down in the road, slicing open my jeans and then my knees and severing, at last, the last bit of hold he’d had on me.

I know my DNA is no longer on that road, 29 winters later. But I still know the patch of blacktop where I bled a bit, and everything changed once again.

It’s not only the canyon, though. It is the mountains, too, the way they feel like home. There is a face on the mountain, and sometimes that face was mournful and sometimes benign but it was always watching me, a patron saint of stone. It made me feel seen, and even though when I drive down those streets where I used to live and I am full of knowing that while I am haunted by that town and while there is a part of my ghost that haunts it still, it is under no obligation to acknowledge its worthless daughter—even now the face sees me. An old friend who’s not going anywhere.

This year, I didn’t make it to Springville for my birthday run until after my birthday. But I still went. I almost, almost drove past my old house. I almost drove the old paths my friend Chris and I used to drive, past houses that were important to us. Past my grandma’s house. But I didn’t, because I don’t want the memories altered. For that morning, I let myself be haunted. I brought the person I am now to the place I lived when I was both myself and utterly different. I drove down Main Street, where the library used to be, past the building where I used to go to gymnastics, along the road that leads out and away.

Where we grow up shapes us. Springville certainly shaped me. But it is not the only thing that makes us who we are. I don’t have to carry the stone—I can, in fact, leave it there, and only visit once a year to be reunited with the ghost of the person I used to be. Then I turn north and drive home.