Come Thanksgiving I will be moving. I will leave my quirky cool little town for the red state of Oklahoma. As I’ve been informing folks about this, I’ve been surprised by the reactions I’ve been getting. People are really going to miss me! One of the transit drivers has been going out of his way to ensure that he picks me more often just so he can see me before I depart. (Our transit system is a little odd.) Other passengers have said that they wished I weren’t going. This past weekend I told my landlord. He knocked on my door last night and wanted to talk. He said that, while not wanting to overstep boundaries, he and his wife had talked about my situation and were concerned. They proposed that I go to Oklahoma for a month to see if I liked it. If it worked, then stay, no worries. BUT they would keep my apartment for me for a month or two, and should it not work out, I would have a place to come back to that was home. I am very touched by this. He and his family have become part of my extended family while I’ve lived here. I joke that that they give Christians a good name. His kids are absolutely amazing, and I’m looking forward to seeing them progress into adulthood. My colleagues at the library are also sad to see me go and say that the shelves are never going to look good again, lol. Probably true, b/c I was the one who stayed on everyone about shelving and “dammit, this is the correct way to do it!” But being chronically ill by oneself is not easy, and I want to see what it is like actually having someone else for companionship, so I’m going to brave the tornadoes and Republicans and give this a go. Miss P will have another whippet for company and plenty of room to run. I’ll have my best friend and someone for whom to cook. She’s promised to take me to the library as often as necessary. When she’s not working, we’ll get out and about. I’ll do things around the house and help take care of the animals. No yard-work, though. I don’t cut grass, muck stalls, or toss hay. Not my purview. My urban limits can only stretch so far.
Tag: Oklahoma
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I Will Send Rain By Rae Meadows-A Review
If you don’t know what “dust pneumonia” is, you need to read this novel by Rae Meadows. She writes with such grace that she breathes color into a 1930s landscape that very likely had little in reality. Set in Mulehead, Oklahoma, the novel tells the story of Annie Bell in unsparing and relatively unsentimental detail but with such deftness that you can taste the grit of the dust that storms through the town and plagues the citizens as they depart one by one. She writes with a tenderness that lays her characters bare, so that the book is free of the cloying element that often accompanies historical fiction. I devoted an entire rainy evening to this book and enjoyed it very much, to my surprise. Not my usual read, but there you go. Books, like life, have a disconcerting way of surprising you, and that is one of the many reasons I love them!
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I Will Send Rain By Rae Meadows-A Review
If you don’t know what “dust pneumonia” is, you need to read this novel by Rae Meadows. She writes with such grace that she breathes color into a 1930s landscape that very likely had little in reality. Set in Mulehead, Oklahoma, the novel tells the story of Annie Bell in unsparing and relatively unsentimental detail but with such deftness that you can taste the grit of the dust that storms through the town and plagues the citizens as they depart one by one. She writes with a tenderness that lays her characters bare, so that the book is free of the cloying element that often accompanies historical fiction. I devoted an entire rainy evening to this book and enjoyed it very much, to my surprise. Not my usual read, but there you go. Books, like life, have a disconcerting way of surprising you, and that is one of the many reasons I love them!