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I just spent six months in Oklahoma and all I got was…
A little personal essay about my time back in the place I grew up.
I still remember the day my parents told me we were moving out of Oklahoma. A few days prior we embarked on a spontaneous trip to Pensacola, Florida. This wasn’t completely out of the ordinary because we had family there and would road trip from our place in northeastern Oklahoma to the beach at least once a year. I should have suspected something was going on when my dad didn’t come with us to spend a day in the sun and sand.
He appeared a little later in the afternoon, joining my mom, cousins, and I as the hot sun focused on our activities. He called my name and I ran over to where he was sitting. “Shea,” he said. “We’re moving to Florida.”
Now, I loved our little family vacations to the sugar white beaches where we drank our Cokes as we watched for dolphins. But in no way was I wanting to leave Oklahoma. Oklahoma was my home, my place. It was where I collected the various scars on my legs from climbing trees and wrecking my bicycle. It was where getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom was accompanied by the howls of coyotes that were too close for comfort. It was where I picked wildflowers and grew raspberries with my dad and played soccer with Garth Brooks’ daughter and played in the snow on days off from…
