About the size of my palm, the orange glass turtle with stout yellow feet has been with me since 1972. We started out in Matawan, New Jersey, where my 7th-grade class presented him to me as a goodbye gift–I was moving to the West Coast with my husband, a transferring medical student. The turtle was sturdy as a paperweight. The sunlight did wonderful things to his translucent body.

I would not get to be the students’ 8th grade reading and English teacher because my husband and I, and now the turtle, would be driving across the country and stopping at National Parks along the way–the Badlands of North Dakota among those places–until finally driving west on I 90, where we would enter Seattle, sparkles on the blue water of Lake Washington filling our eyes and 70s Seattle’s few high-rise towers and iconic Space Needle ahead, mirage-like as we crossed the floating bridge.

I’d never heard of a floating bridge. I’d never seen a “world class” city with so few towers. I didn’t know the difference between the Cascade Mountains behind us and the Olympics we would soon see across the blue of another body of water, Puget Sound. Our new city was a long strip of land running north and south between water, one body a large freshwater lake and the other a salt-water inlet of the Pacific Ocean, each edged in the distance by mountain ranges that hikers, snowshoers and skiers adored. I didn’t know that once I learned the shapes of the bodies of water and the two mountain ranges, I would successfully navigate in my new city.

I had never heard of the explorer Peter Puget or the San Juan Islands in the Strait of Juan de Fuca (How could there be Spanish names in this Scandinavian town?) or the Pig War of 1859. I didn’t know that Nixon would “give back” Federal land here that had housed soldiers and sported “disappearing guns” in the late 1800s and early 1900s to protect citizens, the artillery then modified to become anti-aircraft weapons during WWII. I didn’t know yet that I would see Tricia Nixon transfer this land to Bernie Whitebear — Tricia descending a rope ladder from a helicopter hovering over a grandstand constructed for this ceremony. Part of the gifted land was for the establishment of the Daybreak Star Cultural Center by the United Indians of All Tribes. I didn’t know of the many Northwest tribes working to establish rights to land in the park.

I didn’t know about the Olympic Peninsula or the littler peninsulas off of it: Kitsap and Quimper and Toandos. I didn’t know about a second floating bridge over a fiord called Hood Canal, about state ferries that plied the waters of Puget Sound, and I didn’t know that I would see fir tree cones so big it seemed a mouse could hide in each, or that I would crush red juniper seeds as I hiked and breathe the smell of gin inside the seeds. I didn’t know that we’d find hot springs not shown on maps, plunge into glacial lakes in the Olympic National Forest and that in this new home I would become a writer.

But I had seen the Badlands, the earth there of canyons and loose rocks, dry, arid ground, erosion carved edges of old bluffs. Newly in Seattle, we were not past badlands of our own; there were no teaching jobs for me as my husband attended medical school. Teachers were being what the school district called “rift” because of Boeing’s lack of airplane orders and the depression that pushed Seattle into a reversal of good fortune. As families left Seattle to look for work, the job market for teachers eroded. There really had been a billboard in 1971 just outside of town near the airport that read, “Will the last person leaving Seattle –Turn out the lights?” as unemployment reached 13 percent.

Luck found us when I visited the daughter of one of my mother’s friends. Her children attended a  daycare center while she went to medical school. She told me that the daycare center was searching for a new director. I applied for the job and became part-time director of a staff of teachers, a cook and parent volunteers as well as performed as half-time head teacher in the four-year-old room.

That job eased me into parenthood and parenthood eased me into writing poetry and writing poetry eased me into studying for my Masters in Creative Writing and that degree eased me into teaching others to write not only poetry, but also personal essays and stories.

All of this is to say: the last thing I talked about tonight over dinner with neighbors was the orange glass turtle. One spoke about unwanted advertising on her facebook newsfeed connected to Google searches she’d done online for various products. I, too, hate the big brother aspect of facebook, but there are things I have loved. I told her about receiving a message recently from a man wondering if I am the Sheila Bender who’d been his seventh-grade teacher in Matawan, NJ. I still recognized his name after decades and answered that I was. He wrote back that he was bereft when I told his class I was moving to the West Coast.

“I wish I could have been in two places at once — moving with my husband into a new landscape and teaching you and your classmates in your 8th-grade year,” I messaged him. “I want you to know the orange glass turtle with yellow feet your class gave me as a bon voyage present still holds the magic of my second year of teaching, including, I see, your young heart’s caring,”

My neighbor had urged me to write about the turtle. She said, “The past is always in the present.” And so I started with the turtle and remembered the Seattle I had arrived in and some of my past became my present. And this New Year coming up will be infused now with the pleasure and strength of finding place, the pleasure and strength of opening to luck, and the pleasure and strength of teaching others.