The Scenic Route

I didn’t take the straight path.

I never do. I don’t even think I can. I am constitutionally incapable of a streamlined life. Some people set five-year goals and hit their benchmarks like overachieving cyborgs. I, meanwhile, once started a catering business because I was pregnant and uncomfortable and wanted my husband’s cousin to move out.

That should tell you everything.

I was born in Ohio and raised in Kentucky — not the bourbon-soaked version you see on TV, and not the country club version either. My roots are somewhere in between. My dad was the son of a West Virginia coal miner and the first of five siblings to graduate high school. My mom’s the daughter of Norwegian immigrants.

Senior Photo from High School

We were solidly middle class — the kind of family that fished in creeks, rode four-wheelers, and used the good china when guests came over. I spent just as much time climbing trees as I did acting in local theater or doing the occasional modeling gig. I was picked for the gifted program in kindergarten and diagnosed with ADD (back when it had its own line on the chart). My brain was busy even if I wasn’t — and usually, I wasn’t.

I wasn’t the loud kid. I was the one who could read a room like a script and play the part expected of me.People assumed I was confident, polished, even perfect at times.In reality, I was exhausted from performing "normal."

In the 2000s, I was working in restaurants, retail and corporate America. I was managing just about everything — food, people, crises, my own sense of purpose. I didn’t realize at the time that most of my energy was going toward holding myself together with nothing but charm and panic. It was fine. Until it wasn’t.

Then I moved to Arizona. I fell in love with the desert, with Mexican food, and with a pastry chef named Grég — a Swiss, left-handed, engineer brained and DIYer who baked like a dream and brought a surprising amount of order into my chaos. I bought croissants from his bakery to resell in my shop, and somewhere between flaky layers and invoices, we fell in love. It was fast and furious. I often joke that we went out on a date, and we're still on it.

In 2009, I moved to Switzerland with him. I realized I didn’t speak French somewhere over the Atlantic and had a mild panic attack somewhere over Germany. By the time we landed, I was 87% sure I’d made a terrible decision — but I was too committed (and too stubborn) to back out.

Zermatt Gastronomique Hike 2019. The best.

Then came the babies. And Pâtachou. And the hormonal, slightly irrational decision to start a catering business while six months pregnant because we needed to cover the mortgage. Again: not a plan. But somehow, it worked. It always seems to.

We spent the next decade doing what I think a lot of people do: building something that looked good from the outside and trying not to crack under the pressure of keeping it all going. We raised kids. We made beautiful food. We delivered meals and smiles and ran on fumes.

And then came 2020. The pandemic broke a lot of things. It also revealed a lot of things — like how exhausted we really were, and how far we’d drifted from what we actually wanted. Watching billionaires get richer while our industry bled out felt... disgusting. We were broke. We were tired. And more than anything, we were done.

That was when we started to shift.

We’re building a new life. We’re moving toward land and lemon trees and peace and compost and dinner parties where no one’s in a rush. And I know we’re not there yet, but damn, we’re on the way.

This is the scenic route. It’s not fast. It’s not clean. But it feels like the first time I’m doing it on my own terms.

More of this, less of that.