Draft / memoir entry

I keep circling this question: why do I hunger for an “interesting” life? Not glamorous, not Instagram-worthy, but mythic — textured, strange, handmade, meaningful.

It didn’t come from nowhere.

I grew up on a small, ramshackle Wisconsin farmstead where nothing was ever simple and nothing ever stopped. Animals birthing, fences breaking, fires to tend, grandparents recovering in the downstairs bedroom, neighbors dropping in, casseroles being made, people dying, people healing, people praying.

My mother moved through those years like a village of one — cooking, caring, driving, tending, visiting. My father worked southern swing at the paper mill and still came home to milk goats, haul wood, plant trees. Their lives weren’t easy, but they were alive.

That aliveness imprinted me. It taught me that a life worth living is one that matters, that touches others, that has texture and surprise and responsibility. A ranch house with a tidy lawn and nothing happening? I can imagine it, but only the way I imagine a distant planet.

Maybe I inherited this craving — this need to build a life with edges, layers, stories. Maybe “interesting” is my native ecosystem.