HOMECOMING
“Sooner” is a term used to describe people in the United States who entered unassigned lands that existed in Oklahoma. Although this name came from a place of distaste, now it serves as a sense of pride for the (usually white) people of Oklahoma, who feel that they made their place in the world in that flat, golden state. Sooners are the people who settled down before Oklahoma was even fully established, which didn’t happen until 1907.
Prior to its official recognition, and long after, Oklahoma was a place of conflict and injustice. Decades of government manipulation has led to what I would consider a fairly unremarkable state. Oklahoma is known for its tornados, windmills, and racism. It seems like everyone who has left Oklahoma universally agrees that they’re not going to move back. When I was younger, I did not understand this sentiment. To me, the state was a place where I could run around for hours and take naps under the hot sun when I was tired. I was only a visitor, and I did not spend enough time there to be put off by the weather or the culture. I was blinded by the excitement of being in a place that was familiar enough to be comforting, but foreign enough to be exciting.
Oklahoma is a flat place. I find it both soothing and unnerving that I can see for miles and miles around me. When traveling, the destination seems to stay in the same spot until suddenly the road ends and you’ve arrived. Outside of cities, the only thing around is dirt and wheat and grass; brown and yellow and green. Animals are constantly out, and driving around entails waving at cows, swerving to avoid wayward deer, or even stopping to help a turtle cross the highway. The air smells like the countryside; like wheat and wildflowers. When driving down back roads as a kid, I found urge to stick my head out the window overwhelming; when I looked ahead, my hair was blown back, my skin starched over my face and I could barely open my eyes to see the brown and yellow and green around me. When I looked back, my sight of the road was obscured by the dust being thrown into the air from the car tires as we raced forward.
These aspects of the state have always been comforting to me. They’re things that make me smile as I remember how it felt to exist in a place that seemed so simple. I was not exposed to the state’s faults. I only had the experiences I made through a happy childhood filled with adventure and joy. My parents were both raised in Oklahoma, yet they both agreed that even though I was born in the same town my entire family seemed to reside in, I would be raised elsewhere. Whenever we went to Oklahoma it was not a homecoming, but the pull I used to feel mimicked one.
A collection of memories make up this invisible string that has tugged me back to Oklahoma time and time again. When I think of my childhood, the numerous houses I’ve lived in and the schools I’ve transferred to are important, but they weren’t constant in my life. Going to Oklahoma meant going back to the places and people who knew me. I didn’t have to introduce myself or make small talk until I felt that I fit in. Even after settling down, I still craved Oklahoma.
Was it because this state felt like the only place that stayed the same? When I was growing up, I felt stuck in a pattern of packing and unpacking. Promises that I’d have a place to make roots, and then driving to a new state before I had the chance. I always felt stunted when people would ask me where I was from. I would list the states I had resided in, and I’d see people’s eyes get wider as I kept going. Oklahoma and Texas and Florida and Louisiana and Colorado and Pennsylvania. It started to feel like a mantra as I repeated this practice throughout the years. Despite the many addresses and friends groups I had moved through, I never felt connected to any place. There was always the looming threat of packing and moving again. I felt temporary. Yet everything in Oklahoma was permanent. I wanted to be stuck in time the way my memories were.
I wanted a cup of hot, overly sweet coffee from my Nana. She used to wink when she handed me the red mug and I’d giggle because I knew I wasn’t supposed to have any. My mom would complain and say it’d stunt my growth, but all of the women in my family were short anyways, so I never took her too seriously. I would run around Nana’s front yard and chase her dogs, high on caffeine and joy. When she called me inside, I plopped down into her comfy, weathered armchair and marveled at the way the sunlight snuck in through the windows to bounce off the glass lamp she kept in the living room.
I wanted to go see my grandparents’ on my dad’s side of the family. Their house used to be across the street from where my best friend’s grandparents lived; as a kid, it made sense that we would be friends for life. I only ever saw her once a year, but that never seemed to dim the bond we felt as we ran down the road and hid from her brothers. I remember a long, harrowing journey we took to find an abandoned summerhouse made just for us; looking back, the journey was more like a short walk down a paved road to a playhouse someone in the neighborhood had. We would spend our nights hunting for fireflies, and our days hunting for roly-polies.
When I was ten, my grandparents moved away from my best friend, but that didn’t stop my summer adventures. I wanted to drive out to the big lake by my grandparents new house. I’d go with my cousins, and we would swim to the dock that floated a few meters out before dragging ourselves out of the water. We would never stay on the dock for long though; the only escape from the heat and the horseflies buzzing about was the water, even though the lake held its fair share of secrets. Once we were done, we’d drive back home, and I loved being able to ride around with them. My cousins were older than me, and I always felt so mature whenever we were allowed to roam around town without any adults.
Yet the yearning I felt for this place, full of light and laughter, did not last forever. Summers became about schoolwork and being with the friends I had at home. I could drink coffee at my own house, and swim at the pool in town, and catch fireflies on the street with my dad. Oklahoma was a thousand miles away, and nostalgia was losing its grip on me.
Had I gotten too old? Or was I turning into the city girl my family joked I was? People are what draw me to places, and although I have family in Oklahoma, that is really all there is. Dark woods at night and summers spent on the water became adventures I wanted to read about, not experience. I wanted to be surrounded by lights from buildings and street lamps along the paved, gray road (but I will admit that as comforting as artificial light is, it could never replace the beauty of the stars found in Oklahoma).
The summer I was sixteen, I knew wouldn’t return that particular state down west, but I didn’t know for how long. I still saw family, and I traded dirt roads for sandy deserts as I made trips to see my relatives in New Mexico, but I thought that I had fully outgrown Oklahoma. Now, I no longer question that fact.
As I pondered my relationship with the state, it seemed as though fate itself wanted me to come to a conclusion. I could reminisce for hours about a childhood I appreciate but not longer crave, but I wouldn’t know for sure the role Oklahoma played in my life now until I was on a plane and flying through time zones back to the Sooner State. That day came quicker than anyone expected.
That visit wasn’t a trip of summer fun. It was a visit was about my Nana. The woman who gave me a cup of coffee with too much sugar, and who laughed at everything she said. When I think back, I always remember her manicured hands giving me a red mug, but is that just a detail I made up? Does it matter? I remember the exact way the coffee tasted, and I know that even after ten years I still struggle to understand how she made it so taste rich. I hadn’t had time to get a coffee the morning I flew out to be with her. As I got on the plane there, I knew she was dying. As I got on the plane back, I had laughed with her for the last time.
As I said goodbye to her, it felt like I was saying goodbye to more than just a person. I had left Oklahoma years ago, not knowing when I would return, yet I never gave that state the farewell it warranted. I hadn’t even known that when I was sixteen the tradition of spending summers at my grandparents’ lake house was over. When I outgrew too sweet coffee, and friends I rarely saw, I found comfort in swimming and fishing and summer camp. But it seemed that I was still moving too fast for this place to keep up. I outgrew summer camp and the friends I made there, and once again Oklahoma was just the place I lived in too long ago for me to remember.
The trip to say goodbye was a transition. The Oklahoma of my memories was there, in the hellos and hugs from my families, yet these heartfelt greetings did not hide the fact that the Oklahoma I was coming to now wasn’t the one I spent my summers exploring. I was in Oklahoma City, a place with public transport and expensive hotels. This was not the place of my memories; this was the type of city I’d make an effort to visit. It was full of people and lights and energy.
I don’t know why this aspect of Oklahoma was such a shock. I spent most of my life in a suburban town with cities and farmland the same distances away, yet it had never occurred to me that Oklahoma could be like this too. The perception I have of my childhood summers there is one-dimensional. There is no room for bustling nightlife. Oklahoma was a place where my summers were unique. I could not fathom the idea that anywhere else would have given me the sane feelings of freedom and adolescent arrogance. But that was the past.
On the trio to say goodbye, I was no longer a child chasing after cousins who I thought to be the definition of maturity. I didn’t spend my days running through the woods or hanging my head out of a car flying down a dirt road. This time, I was an adult, talking to my family about the issues I would have been shielded from as a kid. I felt like an equal as my cousins and I drove around town, entertaining ourselves while our moms caught up. It had always felt right that the women who raised us were a trio of girls brought together by blood, and that we were an extension of that identity.
Going back to Oklahoma mimicked a homecoming. There, I was not home in the sense that I was where I grew up, but I was home with the people who know me the best. Oklahoma is my place, but I know it is not where I will settle down. It is universally agreed that if you leave Oklahoma, you don’t move back. But that doesn’t mean I don’t return to it often. Sometimes, I visit through stories from family, and other times it’s through memories of a childhood best friend I don’t talk to anymore. I have changed, but it seems Oklahoma has too. I had thought my connection to the state was gone; now I know it’s just different. I hadn’t recognized it before, and maybe I hadn’t needed to. I have time to understand what this place means to me. When I come back again, I know I will have flat roads and windmills and family waiting for me.
Asia Frantz is a junior in the Environmental Studies Program at SUNY ESF from western Pennsylvania. She enjoys writing about the relationships that exist between people and nature and exploring how they change over time.
