<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n I like basements. I love basements, places where I feel oddly at home. And happy.<\/p>\n We had a basement once, when I was seven, when my parents rented a house for one year in Middletown, New Jersey. Since we were staying only a year, and it was the first time I’d lived in a house that was neither, A) my family’s home prior to my birth, nor B)\u00a0brand new, we being the first and only occupants; this house didn’t feel like ours. It was someone else’s choice of wallpaper, someone else’s\u00a0choice of carpet\u2026 someone else’s home. But it did have a basement. I’d never seen one before — it was like a secret room!<\/p>\n Only one item was in that Middletown basement when we arrived: a cardboard house. It was gender-neutral, so any child could make it whatever he or she wished. I would play for hours there, in that cardboard house, that kind of play that happens deep within a child’s imagination; existing only in that moment, living in a world\u00a0completely invisible to everyone else. But it is real.<\/p>\n That was the first (and only) time growing up that we were surrounded by forest (prior to that, it was either the streets of Brooklyn or the desert of Las Vegas). Flora, flora everywhere! The Garden State. I learned to figure skate on the frozen\u00a0Navesink River<\/a>.\u00a0When it snowed, we slid down the street\u00a0(a slight hill) on sleds, and our father took us to chop down our own Christmas tree. It was all pretty magical stuff to a seven year-old, right down to the hours I passed in the\u00a0basement.<\/p>\n We moved back to Las Vegas the following summer, where I remained until high school graduation. At seventeen, I couldn’t get out of that town fast enough, get back to the east coast, where naturally I’d decided to go to college. Because I had an opportunity to fly back on a family friend’s private plane, I arrived in New York a full month before classes were to begin, and stayed with my father at\u00a0his sister Helen’s house in Bayside, Queens (he and my mother had divorced the year\u00a0before, and being Greeks, family always lives\u00a0with family). A month is a long time to live with your overly-protective Greek father and his widowed sister in a town where you know no one (and have no car), so I went around visiting relatives: one grandmother, five aunts, five uncles, and ten cousins.<\/p>\nA new environment has the power to change not just what\u00a0we see, but how\u00a0we see.<\/h1>\n