I am one of the editor’s daughters, as I presume most of the readership knows. He put my photo on the back cover of a series called Farm Romance in the late 90’s, and the same photo has shown up in his books and magazines over and over again, like pins threaded with red string across a map. I admit, I look much different now than the giggling, nearly bald toddler running down the red cinder road between the pines, although I’d like to think I have maintained the way my eyes disappear when I grin and the toothiness of that smile.

I step out of my truck and into a world that smells like smoke and I try (and fail) not to think about how we left. In my head I can hear my own voice in the hysterical rush of then and I push down a rising sympathy-pang of panic in the now and take a deep breath. The fire which had threatened our family farm had burned neatly around the buildings and the fields and livestock, thanks to the tireless work of firefighters and family members, sparing all but trees and fences. As the fire crested the rim-rock and plunged down the hill behind our home three days prior, my husband and I made the choice to evacuate while my parents stayed behind in a home more protected but no-less-close to the fire than our own.

In the end, we are all wolves to someone. We shake up each other’s ecosystems and establish our own boundaries and pathways within them. I help throw out hay, I shape the remainder of my dad’s morning. I get a text from my friend, I make additions to this article. I find a black widow spider in my coatsleeve, I alter my habits around getting ready to put on my coat. But the changes we make are, by and large, neutral – it is how we think of those changes and how we respond to them that shapes the desire paths of our own lives.

Are you familiar with the parable of the farmer’s problem? I doubt it, you see, as it’s a new one I just wrote. A few weeks ago, dad asked me to help him with a repair on the dozer. “What is the problem we’re looking at?” I asked, peering at a muddle of wires and grease and dirt. Dad pointed. “That right there is the problem…”

Some kids stay with the farm until they are old and bitter and wish for “a better life.” Maybe they should have left. Some of them quit early, leave right away and sell the farm when their parents pass. Maybe they should have stayed. Others live in the trenches of those feelings and those wonderings until it all crushes them. Who can say which path is right for a person: the paved road out or the washboard dirt road back in?