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.

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.

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?