Flat Anna wanted to go to Louisville, Kentucky, having become  enchanted with the  stories told to her while sitting with her cheek pressed against  grandma's knee.  " A city can afford a woman  certain opportunities whereas a mill town has its limitations," grandma lamented.  Flat Anna loved the way grand ma talked about life, "I guess it comes from all those years of teaching Theory of Knowledge," thought Anna.     Although Flat Anna traveled extensively, often she  felt that she only apprehended  the surface of things.  Hours upon hours in school libraries could not compete with this admonition of grandma's, "you can be young without money but you cannot be old with it."    Flat Anna came to appreciate that mistakes made in youth can cost one dearly, particularly for a woman on the verge of arrival  to her fortieth decade.   Nothing like  self-reflection in the din of late night snoring in a miserable small bedroom permeated with the smell of alcohol and tobacco rising off the surface of the skin of the man sleeping it it, a woman could begin to feel a restlessness inspired by her  fear of suffocation and a life going nowhere.  Although young and quite precocious, Flat Anna entertained this observation that a woman in her forties garners a kind of intensity, in her recognition that if the mistakes of youth were to be rectified, it would have to happen soon while a vestige of one's attractiveness was still on board.