As a young child, she spent the summers in Florida with family friends. She was continually overwhelmed by the amount of asphalt she found there, the meeting place for the neighborhood children being the hot black tar pool at the end of the cul-du-sac. Often, in the early mornings, they could find a sheath of snakeskin or a small sun dried lizard embedded into the cracks in the road. Whenever an animal had sloughed off a part of itself, the children were there to find it, to observe it, to assess its value, but never to mourn it. She began to wonder what parts of herself she would ultimately leave behind and what poor sap would be there to find them.
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