Doe Season Question 3

In Andy’s childhood, everything is constant and the woods, as the book says, are a good picture of this. “They were riding over gentle hills, the woods on both sides now-the same woods, she knew, because she had been watching the whole way, even while she slept. They had been in her dreams, and she never lost sight of them.” (Kaplan 457) When I was a child, I would remember waking up everyday with a sense that everything was alright. There was nothing complicated, there was nothing that I couldn’t figure out and even if there was, I always had mom and dad to ask. Life was simple. Transitioning to adulthood is a whole new experience. “That was the first time she’d seen the ocean, and it frightened her. It was huge and empty, yet always moving. Everything lay hidden.”(459) The ocean is the image of adulthood, frighteningly empty because of the unknown. Life gets a lot more complicated when you reach adulthood. One has college decisions to make, professional decisions need to be made, and you wonder if you’ll ever get married. There are endless questions and possibilities and you no longer have mom and dad to make the decisions for you. When you get thrown into the giant sea of “the adult world”, life decisions are bigger, consequences of those decisions are greater and you have to figure everything out without the constant support base you had when you were young. Andy’s life is no different.