Breaking: US rural life is diverse

Sometimes men pay me to talk to them. It’s not sexual, as far as I can tell. I don’t know what they think they want, exactly. I think they mostly want an attractive-enough woman to be nice to them for an hour.

I love doing this. I love these men. I genuinely smile at their joy and genuinely cry at their sorrow. People wear me out anyway, but this level of emotion and vulnerability… what makes these conversations interesting and rewarding also makes them too tiring to do too often.

Recently, a man reached out to me in part because I’ve been writing about rural life, and he had moved to a tiny town on the Oregon Coast.

Listening to him was so evocative.