lite & lucid

I have been irrationally excited to write this blog; more excited than I’ve been for ANY of the other blogs. This one marks the very, very real fact that I have moved from Enid, Oklahoma after almost seven years.  As much as I’ve anticipated moving I have admittedly been disproportionately excited about the title of this blog for well over a year now.  I knew I would figure out what I was going to write below it, and that was important, but it could never be as clever as the title.  I swooned and shimmied like a Kristen Wigg character on SNL.  I was so excited to title this (drum roll) ‘The Garden of Enid’.  BOOM!  See what I did there!!??  Don’t you get my personal irony in that immediately!?  I was going to delicately craft the message that I landed here, and grew and blossomed under difficult circumstances.  Like a damn lotus flower!  Like a phoenix!  My very rudimentary and underdeveloped mental notes on the idea included the tragedies I’d survived, my many seasons and that as many times as I thought I was ready to leave or the time was right, that in fact I hadn’t learned all the universe had in store for me to learn here in my Garden of Enid.  That means I wasn’t done growing.  I couldn’t yet be transplanted.  Get it!?  See!?  Tragedy and perseverance while heading West!  It’s an American theme!  I couldn’t wait to blend in what I learned at the Cherokee Strip Museum about Enid hosting the largest land run in U.S. history.  Oh, the possibilities!  How clever and meaningful I could craft this departure essay!  I am still giddy as the Target Lady seeing toothbrushes on sale thinking about the juicy literary potential.

As I prepared to move to the Pacific Northwest, which I’ve been waiting not-so-patiently to do for about 12 years, this would be my love letter to the city of Enid!  Cue – I Will Always Love You by the great Whitney Houston.  (Please take a moment for that classic to play in your mind – better yet, bring it up on YouTube right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JWTaaS7LdU )  I’m listening to it too; what a classic.  However, all my plans and excitement met a tragic death when a simple browser search showed that ‘Garden of Enid’ is already taken by an award-winning web comic, which has also been made into a two part graphic novel “The Garden of Enid – Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl”.

Well.

One more setback.  More appropriately, a complete derailment of my triumphant, epic post that I couldn’t wait to thrust at the world in Matt Damon fashion from Good Will Hunting, “How do you like them apples”?  I should have guessed it was too good of a title not to have been taken already.  Like many things about my life in Enid, Oklahoma in the past six plus years, this too, was unexpected and more than just a little weird.  I instantly had another idea, I would simply drop out the word Mormon and just call it ‘The Garden of Enid – Adventures of a Weird Girl”.  Heehee.  That’s better than I could have imagined in the first place and probably the most accurate a title could be for me.  By the end of writing this I’m sure I can rip off some other clever title and resolve to be satisfied with the outcome. (I didn’t).

Speaking of weird; I must be at the stage in my life where I become very aware of real tragedies, or at least come to terms with my underdeveloped coping strategies.  It’s probably a legitimate stage of adult psychological development.  I should look into that.  This must be when one discovers that plans really don’t work out, and life is really, really tricky.  Not like, oh I’ll just change my major and find a different job after collage tricky, but like friends and family your age or younger die and you can’t understand it, and the pillars of your life crumble, and then somehow it all gets propped back up again and is nearly unrecognizable.  It seems like around this time relationships have had enough time to grow stale and collapse and careers have become disappointing or faced great transition.  It’s been disorienting to put it mildly.  It’s getting-buried-alive-and-digging-your-way-out-with-your-bear-hands disorienting.  These years have at times left me on my knees, knocked down on my back, and had me against the ropes – bloodied and bruised.  But, what I have discovered  is that I truly have grit.  I never went away, or gave up on the things I wanted even when looking back I clearly should have at times.  I’m too Midwestern-stubborn for that though.  Maybe I’m the dandelion in the perfect front yard.  TrueGreen can’t kill me.  I keep popping up and spreading my fluffy white – wait, another underdeveloped metaphor, or is it an analogy?  I’m the tumbleweed that you just can’t hit – I keep rolling (this works well for the part of the state I was in).  You understand.  More accurately, the dust settled enough for me to see myself in the mirror, and I learned who I really was and how to carry on.

Anyway, I didn’t win any title matches (reference the being against the ropes above), but I did weather the storms!  This is another great comparison because Oklahoma has particularly nasty storms; thunderstorms, ice storms, and tornados.  Sometimes there is so much beauty hidden in these, but more often I found myself in a bathtub worried for my life, even though these phenomenons were not new to me.  I just knew I needed a flashlight, some food, and some water.  I grew up in neighboring state of Missouri, which has its fair share of extreme weather.  We do tornado drills in school, roofs are occasionally ripped off of buildings and homes and sometimes a tree will be completely uprooted and flung somewhere unsuspecting.  I learned from my Grandmother’s example that when that happens and there’s a giant tree in your neighbor’s front yard you can just decorate the roots for Christmas to brighten the situation.  She even made the paper for it.  If we measure the extremity of weather by the number of news teams and storm chasers it employs and times it floods major cities, then Oklahoma wins that battle by a long shot.  The state cartoon character is even ‘Gusty’.  My only requirement for my first home in Oklahoma was to have a basement. I digress…

I have weathered some intense stormage here in the Sooner state.  I am as conflicted about this place as it is about its own complex history.  During the famous ‘land runs’ which carved even more away from many Native Americans, many of whom had already been ‘relocated’ here from other parts of the country, Sooner was the nickname for those who literally jumped the gun, as each run started with a pistol shot.  Boomer was the label for those who lobbied heavily to have the land reallocated to settlers.  Sooner is now thought to refer more nostalgically to the ‘can-do’ mentality of many early pioneer Oklahomans according to the University of Oklahoma sports history website.  While history certainly is complex, I view my stop through this not-so-distantly pioneer land as a conflicted time in my own humble history.  Hopefully the most conflicted.  I came here with good intentions to do a job and support a life I believed in, as no doubt many before me have.  And in perhaps in a similar fashion I learned a lot about survival on the plains.  I have gained far more than I could have imagined, mostly in the form of incredibly supportive relationships and evolutions in my own resilience.  I can say I am relieved to close the chapter though, and turn the page to the open road that leads to the mountains, sea and my future in the West.  I offer homage to pioneers who before me never settled for what could be farther down the road.  I too took my trailer, a modern covered wagon, and my chances, and made the permanent trek.

As I set out, I waved good-bye while the wind unapologetically blew my hair into my face.  I bid adieu to the incredible sunsets and sunrises, the beautiful fields of wheat and bright yellow canola, the unimaginable generosity and friendliness of neighbors, and simply the vastness of the Western part of the state.  I take with me an even vaster collection of memories, both wonderful and bittersweet, and leave friends, students, section lines and the crowded skies above Vance Air Force Base to keep doing what they’ve always done.  And I venture romantically, finally, humbly, in that direction to which I have always been drawn, delayed as I was by the meaning squeezed between the lines of life.  It was as hard as it was surprising and as it was necessary.  Now though, it is also over.  More appropriately, it is complete.  Fare-thee-well, Oklahoma, fare-the-well.