1. The Phone Call

My husband’s face popped up on my phone as it rang. I suddenly had a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I didn’t want to answer. Because I knew. I knew why he was calling. He was calling to tell me my life was going to change dramatically; I just wasn’t ready to hear it. But I picked up the phone anyway. He sounded cheerful, which confirmed my suspicions; he’s never cheerful at work. As he continued speaking, my heart sank. He had gotten a job offer from the university he’d just interviewed at the week before, Oklahoma State University. I had already heard how he’d literally gotten a thumbs-up at his interview presentation, and how they all seemed to love what he had to say. He had told me how he loved the people and the work atmosphere. I should have known that this was the beginning of the end, and that we’d be moving from a community I’d lived in for all but two years of my life to a community where I’d never been, knew no one, and had no ties to nor affinity for.


Had I jinxed it? For more than two years my husband had been interviewing for jobs. He had flown to Virginia, driven to Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, even been flown eight hours across the Atlantic to a ridiculously and conversely short interview at the University of Cork in Ireland. Each time he went, I hopped on the web and started looking at houses, at schools, at local coffee shops and gyms. More often than not, by the time he got the rejection email or phone call, I had already picked out the top three houses we were going to bid on. But when he left for the interview in Oklahoma mid-December, I was so fixated on the upcoming Christmas holiday that I didn’t even look up where Stillwater was on a map. I figured it was in the south, and a cultural cousin to Texas, so I thought he wouldn’t find it at all interesting.


But I underestimated the power of feeling valued. Appreciated. Admired. Something he had been missing in his current job, and maybe for much of his professional life in general. Those folks in Oklahoma gushed. He lapped it up. The atmosphere was positive. They offered him half again his current salary, and allowed him to negotiate for a bit more. They gave him a travel budget, an equipment budget, a relocation allowance. They complimented him. They seemed interested in what he had to say. He was caught, hook, line and sinker. He had to say yes. And I knew he had to say yes. And I wept.


Then I argued with myself. My son and I could stay here, I thought, while he finished high school, only three and a half more years. We wouldn’t be the first couple to have a commuter marriage, right? Although ten hours was a pretty hefty commute, we could manage, I told myself. I could stay in my house! With my stuff! And see my friends! And stay in my town! I got excited. Yes, this would work! We would make it work, dammit.


But the other more sensible part of myself realized that my staying here, with no paying job, and creating a second set of bills, didn’t make sense. And being apart, though possible, is not healthy for a marriage or a family. We would be moving. It would break my heart, but we would be moving.
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We hemmed and hawed about the best way and the best time to tell our friends. We wanted to tell our close friends first before advertising to the world at large, but the New Year’s Eve party where we could tell most of them at once was coming up and we decided that we didn’t want to hijack our friends’ party for our own announcement. So we announced it on Facebook, awkwardly, and of course not catching the folks who aren’t on social media or who don’t look very often. And when we announced it, we found that somebody’s cousin, or someone they knew in grad school, or a friend of a friend “had been in Oklahoma and loved it, and oh, I’m sure you will too…” and I got even more sad, because I knew people felt the need to comfort me because I was going to the Middle of Nowhere. I mean, no offense to the people of Stillwater, Oklahoma, but I already live in someplace that many consider to be the Middle of Nowhere; so moving to a place that’s even less remarkable is like being condemned to purgatory. From someplace with a bit of a sense of style, with culture, to someplace that has a disproportionate number of chain restaurants and stores.  Like going from champagne to tap water. And to make matters worse, when we looked online for houses, I wanted to die. Nothing our style. Nothing I felt I could live in. A plethora of 60s and 70s-era low-lying ranch style homes like the one I grew up in. I realized that late December/early January is not the best time to look for houses anywhere, but these were particularly bad. It was like going through the after-Christmas bargain basement sales, looking at the puke green fuzzy slippers in two different sizes, and the oversized purple jacket missing a few buttons, and the zebra-print leggings with one leg shorter than the other. Disaster.

My husband convinced me that maybe it would be better to see some of these houses in person, and maybe we would find something charming, something that fit us. Stillwater is only a nine-hour drive, he said. We can go take a look. So we decided to take a short trip. We found someone to watch our dog, packed a few things in a bag, convinced our teenaged son he could watch the same videos in the back seat that  he’d been planning to watch lying on the couch, and off we went. So, with that silly tune in my head from the musical (“Oh-oh-oh-ohhhhhhhh-kla-homa, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain....”), and blessed with a reprieve from the winter weather blasts we’d been having, we  made our way out of central Illinois and headed southwest. Stillwater or bust.