When I was a little girl, I read. A lot. I didn’t have many friends, and I spent a ton of my time and my weekends at my grandparent’s place exploring the woods and imagining great adventures for myself.

Growing into my junior high years was tough. Here, several different grade schools and up combining into the same junior high and high school. It was rough on me…the quiet, odd bookworm who would never speak up in class but always got the right answers.

I made few friends, but they were amazing and have stuck by me for the last ten, fifteen years.

We had some great adventures together.

But I never stopped imagining the adventures I’d have for myself as I got older.

I thought I’d go to college, become a nurse. I wanted to be a traveling nurse. That’s a real thing, you know. I wanted to see the Grand Canyon. Seattle. The Appalachian Trail and the coast in Maine. I wanted to eat pizza in Chicago and see the lights in Time Square.

It didn’t quite work out for me that way.

I made decisions in my life that made things a lot more difficult for myself than it had to be. There were twists and turns I never saw coming.

There were wrecks. Carnage.

There’s been a hell of a lot of clean-up.

And a lot of…stalling. Drifting. Merely maintaining until something happened to shake things up and cause some interest, some kind of reaction.

In all my imaginings, I never dreamed I’d be living in the same town I grew up in, two children by two different men, working in a factory.

But you know what? Life is still an adventure. A beautiful one. A heartbreaking one. One filled with love and belly laughs. Scraped knees and the occasional staples in the head (boy, that was a day!) Board games and cartoon movies and karaoke.

Sometimes you look for adventure, and something extraordinary comes along and surprises you.