“If you move me back to the South, I want chickens.”
The words came like spitfire from my wife’s mouth.
She held my gaze like a gunslinger.
“Of course,” I said. She’d had chickens on her mind since Vermont.
That was five years ago, when I’d uprooted her and our new baby. I’m an ordained minister, and we’d left North Carolina so that I could take my first call at a church tucked away in the Green Mountains. We loved the snow. We loved the cold. We loved Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and Bernie Sanders, but we couldn’t adapt to the feeling of isolation.








