Pageant Question: Which freedom do you value the most: life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness? When do you think these rights should be taken away from a person?

People officially started calling the neighborhoods "Camps" when I was eight, but they were already camps long before I was born.  My family has been living in the same Camp for five generations.  Fences went up in my great-grandmother's time, and my grandmother was the one who told me the history.

Grandma Nonna, at eighty, was the oldest person in our Camp.  Life expectancy was in the sixties, so Grandma Nonna was revered for her age and wisdom.  She told me that when the Camps were "neighborhoods", the houses stood shoulder to shoulder, and only family owned each house.  A single family lived inside.  Grandparents lived in their own homes.  Aunts and uncles had others.  The use of so much space for just four people seemed outrageously decadent to me.

When she was small, Grandma Nonna said there were still roads and even some cars in her neighborhood.  Once she told me about roads and where they used to be, I would wander our Camp and look for signs.  I found hidden curbs and even, what she called, a "manhole cover".  That sounded dirty.  I found a rock that she said was probably rubble from a road.  I carry it with me.