"I wish Eve would've asked me to defend her," a top civil rights attorney said to me in 2018, a nod to the fact that I am suing a fundamentalist Christian college in Chicago. "She made a good defense. No mens rae. But she needed an appellate lawyer." I'd called him to discuss my gender discrimination case: Garrick v. Moody Bible Institute. Almost immediately he wanted me to know, "I'm Jewish, but not practicing." This attorney has a bulldog insignia on his website and a black gunslinger mustache hooded above his poetic lips.

At 40, single, and working as a communications professor at a conservative Christian college in Chicago, I moved in with the Mennonites, a community of liberal Christians, for some company.

One spring, my five housemates and I ordered a Community Supported Agriculture box from a local farm in Illinois. From May to September, our CSA box arrived weekly with eggs of many different sizes, shapes, and colors like a Pottery Barn palette of paints—China White, Cotton White, Halcyon Green, and my favorite, Alpaca.

“The smart went west,” my grandmother liked to say. She and my grandfather left Kansas City when my mom was five and never looked back. My brother and sister-in-law, who live in San Diego, have an image on their wall of the California flag, the flag of the great Bear Republic—a sturdy brown bear painted on raw oak, the bear pacing, head down, nose forward, tracking the scent, heading west. Aren’t we all heading west? Or, at least, longing to do so? This hankering to head west, to walk off one’s map. Surely, there must be more! we cry.