When I moved to Atlanta as a teenager, my mother looked at a home just inside the perimeter that once belonged to Maya Angelou. 

We did not live there. Mom chose instead to move us into a townhouse in Sandy Springs to avoid to traffic on Ashford-Dunwoody. 

I could not pass the house in Dunwoody without thinking of Dr. Angelou-- her work as poet, novelist, activist; her uncredited turn as a dancer in Porgy and Bess; the bliss she found in the glitches of it all. 

Every time we drove by, I wondered what it would have been to have cooked in her kitchen, to have been a teenager within the energy of those walls. 

I have this quote tacked above my desk: 

"Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told, 'I'm with you kid. Let's go.’”