Essay Prompt: Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family. New Jersey always looked the prettiest in August. The intensity of the sun somehow magnifies the beauty of the green trees and blue lakes in my former hometown of Sparta. This beauty that I had taken for granted the past sixteen years that I now longed for was slowly fading into a distant memory, slipping through my windowpanes and folding into itself, no longer tangible to my familiar hand. The nostalgia and growing sadness seemed to personify itself through the array of pink flowers and green grass, which were wilting and overgrown. I packed my clothes, knowledge, and memories into a cardboard box and sat shotgun as my mother drove too fast down Route 280, thinking how easily we could’ve crashed; confused as to not knowing which fate I’d rather have happen first. At family parties, I repeatedly heard the word “settle.” This word had rung in my head the first night after moving away, reverberating off the walls of my skull. I was barely even moved in, let alone “settled”. I laid in bed, drowning in the fear and anxiety of the first day of school, at the thought of having to ”settle” with this fast-paced lifestyle and complications of my new home. While my mother remained in New Jersey, over sixty miles away, I lived Monday to Friday in New York with my father. My mother’s breast cancer required chemotherapy, radiation, and all the heartbreak in between, in addition to a full time job as a bus driver and mother. My formerly easygoing life in New Jersey seemed so far away compared to the burdens I was now balancing. With weekend visits to my mom throughout chemo and weeks spent with my dad, I was always missing someone. I guess I had underestimated the pain of “settling”. November began with the same dreary, bone-rattling chill as it always did. The overall mood in my house was always measured by the amount of Christmas decorations we had put up by Thanksgiving and the gradual dulling of my father’s perpetual twinkle in his eyes as his seasonal depression began to overcome him. The only thing missing from this otherwise normal scenario was the lack of my mother’s contagious cheerful attitude, which my father and I had tried to reciprocate to her as she started chemo. Around Thanksgiving, my mother’s stationary spot in the kitchen