Homesickness: The Ghosts of Oklahoma

I was just thinking about this post this morning. I wrote it about this time last year. Three years in Phoenix, AZ, and I was missing everything about home. We've since moved back.

Now I am freezing my ass off... I am still happy to be home :-)

Homesickness: The Ghosts of Oklahoma

Winded, I plop myself onto the ground, leaning back to enjoy the warm sun on my face. Bittersweet... I would happily trade a dozen of these moments to hover over the old floor furnace in my childhood home. For just a little while, and absorb the sensory overload that IS my family and friends; just a minute... maybe two.

Homesickness weighs on my shoulders and sours in my stomach. Choking on the warm air, I can feel my heart, burdened by my heavy tears, sinking down through me into the hard ground below. Anchoring me on the spot and stopping time to draw out a single, torturous moment.

It's a warm January birthing a hot February, hotter March, and a baking April; a scattered litter of hot and sunny days bleeding into one another. In Oklahoma, the children are bundled in their cozy layers while ice frosts my hometown. Kids out of school; enjoying snow days with soaked mittens and pink noses.

Life goes on...

A fog of secrets and complaints will fall on other deserving ears, but my head hums with a loud silence. Ghosts of stories that will reach me too late lose their significance and fall sleepily to my feet. I shove them aside. Kicking up the dust and dirt that Arizona gifts me.

Oklahoma hasn't even noticed, and I am forgotten in Arizona.