I grew up in a small barn that the family before us had turned into a temporary house. My dad cut firewood on the weekends and taught every one of his children the importance of having two winters’ worth of wood carefully stacked to dry in the woodshed. My mom taught us the potential of crystals and divined our future from a deck of animal-themed tarot cards. As children we spent our lives by the creek, eating dry ramen noodles and building spaceships to leave the planet. When my parents fought we were sent to our grandmother’s house. Our grandmother kept us busy feeding and grooming her varied collection of animals, which included a fox, a doe, a family of opossums, a monkey, three or four rabbits, and a multitude of cats, dogs, and chickens, to name a few. Nights there were spent listening to endless hours of dice rolling across the tablecloth and watching alien documentaries that my uncle put on to help piece together the story of his abduction.