The farm belonged to my Great-Grandma and Granddad Kennedy. They lived in the original house until they tore it down and built a brick one in its place, but everything around that house stayed the same for years — the barns, the pens, the chicken coop, an orchard with an apricot tree whose low-hanging limbs were both a climbing tool and a weapon, depending on which grandkid you asked. Granddad kept Shetland ponies out there too. Mean ones. They threw more grandchildren than they ever carried gently, and every kid on that farm has a story about getting bucked off one of them at some point.
That’s the part that sounds like a normal childhood, and it was. But the part I go back to most isn’t the barns or the ponies. It’s the pasture.
We sat on a hill, and from there, facing south and west, I could see clear across land that didn’t belong to us — other people’s fields, other people’s fences, all of it rolling out under that huge Oklahoma sky. There weren’t many trees to interrupt the view. Just grass. Tall prairie grass that never stayed still, bending one direction under one gust, then snapping the other way the second the wind changed its mind. I could watch it for an hour. It was mesmerizing, the way it moved without ever actually going anywhere — pushed one way, then the other, never finished, never settled.
I walked out into that pasture more times than I could count as a teenager. I told myself I was just walking. Clearing my head. Getting away from the house for a while. I didn’t have language yet for what I was actually doing, which was processing things no teenager should have had to carry alone — the abuse, the anger underneath it, the slow private work of figuring out a way out of a life I hadn’t chosen and couldn’t yet leave.
Looking back now, I understand the grass better than I did then. It bent one way because something pushed it. Then it bent the other way because something pushed it again. It never got to choose its own direction, and yet it never broke, either. It just kept moving with whatever came at it, bending instead of snapping, settling for a moment before the next gust came through and asked something new of it.
I didn’t know I was looking at a picture of myself out there. I just knew the wind made sense to me in a way nothing happening inside that house did.
That land carries more than my own history, and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend my story is the only one that ground holds. Oklahoma became home to my family because of treaties and removals that none of us asked for, on a map drawn by people who had never set foot on the soil they were dividing. The Potawatomi and the Chickasaw and so many other nations ended up on this same red dirt, by force, generations before I ever walked a pasture working something out in my own head. I grew up free to wander that hill whenever I needed to. Plenty of people who came to this same state before me weren’t given that choice at all.
I don’t know how to fully hold both of those truths at once — that the land gave me something I needed, and that the land itself was never neutral ground to begin with. I’m not sure you’re supposed to fully resolve a thing like that. I think you just keep walking the pasture, keep watching the grass bend and bend back, and let both truths exist in the same wide, windy view.
I was a teenager walking my woes away out there. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I just knew the grass never stopped moving, and somehow, neither did I.
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