The Process Of Living In Nebraska

Thinner than a grain of salt, the glass of a light bulb is so much more flimsy than the glass of a window or liquid containers. The lightbulb of my life could remain intact, but only if it didn’t attempt to shine. Meanwhile, back in Nebraska, the rest of my family also did a good job of making those who didn’t know any better think that nothing had changed and that we were still perfect. My mother and father decided to stay together because neither of them could handle any more drastic of a change. Sometimes I wonder if I would have rather seen them try to create new lives separately instead of compromise back into a unhappy marriage. It was almost like I was raised by divorced parents in the first place with the way that I would go several
It didn’t take long before I was able to say that I had recovered, but the aftermath still lingered. It has taken two years for me to be able to fully process and stabilize and, dare I say, mature? It was not until writing this that I was able to incorporate my two opposing views of home into each other. While I was in the process of living in Nebraska I saw home as a continuity of sameness. While I was in college, I saw home through the lens of a variety of options. Now looking back as I prepare to graduate college in three weeks and settle into my own home without my parents in two months, I can see how even though I always had the same home with little sense of “home,” all along I had different homes within one home in the form of the different buildings on the
In each building on the farm, I lived a different life. In the low and long heifer barn that housed the calves I would train to show at the county fair, I transformed from a fifty pound girl into a controller of a 500 pound beast, proving the mind over matter adage that I can do anything I set my mind to. The wood barn gave me the confidence to think I could fly, both figuratively and literally. The fence separating this storage building on the edge of the farmyard from the pasture beside it was tall enough that I could climb up the slots and then pull myself up onto the gritty tile roof. In the warmer months, my cousins and I would play pretend up on the precariously peaked roof, and in the winter we would jump off the roof and over the fence into the snowbanks of the field twenty feet below. It’s a wonder that I never ended up in a more serious incident while playing on the farm than being stuck up to my waist in a snowbank and being trapped up to my knees in a manure pen. However, the most dangerous habitation I created was my Laura Ingalls Wilder dugout. One day my father used a backhoe to dig a hole three feet wide, long, and deep to use the dirt for some ranching purpose. I tried to expand my earth home by burrowing tunnels into the walls of the hole, but one day my dugout disappeared, as the hole was filled back up out of fear that these tunnels would collapse on