Cori and the Machine

Machines and I have never gotten along. Over the course of my life, I've caused accidents, serious malfunctions, and downright destruction with various electronics. As a teenage girl who was homeschooled her whole life, I'd been able to avoid them mostly. But, then something happened that forced me into a new world where I was almost always surrounded by them.

My father got laid off from his job on the Iron Range of Minnesota, and our large family had to relocate to the Northwest Plains of Iowa. In an entirely new landscape, living right next to a large wind farm where my father was a new wind turbine technician, my mother, my siblings and I were plunged into unexpected changes, one right after the other.

An unpreventable accident, financial troubles, school bullies, new domestic responsibilities, and a romance with the neighbor boy... all of these led me to the one machine that changed my life permanently. It was the one machine that changed my luck, taught me how to love and assert myself, discover an intelligence I didn't know I had, and what infinity really, truly symbolized.

My name is Cori Wahlman, and this is what happened, when I stopped being afraid.