Has been growing in the office. I waded through a stack of miscellaneous papers, file-ables, bills, end-of-year statements, circulars, catalogs, and the refinance papers, found a slip for taxes on an acreage I inherited in Oklahoma—and couldn’t even find out what year it was for or if it had been paid.<\/p>\n
There was a phone number. And sometimes dealing with Anadarko, Oklahoma is a bit of a warm fuzzy. My great-grandads and great-grandmums on both sides came there before statehood (1907)…even before the land run. My great-grandad and granddad on Mum’s side had their own agreement directly with the Kiowa tribe, for the payment of a cow of their choice and the right to hold meetings on the land, where otherwise my family ran horses and cattle. Suffice it to say—we’re kinda from way-back in town history. And my uncle, after a combine accident that cost him his arm, became county clerk there. So when I had to call the county treasurer and ask if I was paid up on taxes, the conversation went pretty fast—I give my name, they look it up, and have the record instantly, the treasurer knows pretty well where the parcel is, I explain who my mother was, give the last name—oh, yeah. I say who my uncle was, oh, yeah—the man I’m talking to knew him well. It’s old home week, and oh, yeah, if there’s ever a problem, and you need to find me, just ask one of that family and they’ll find me…<\/p>\n
Anadarko’s growing: it’s got its Walmart and all; but there’s still a lot of the old town that functions, where I remember buying barbecue from an outdoor pit, where my other-side grandad ran the only gas station on that side of town, and I pumped gas and washed windshields when I was about 10, and cute; where the cousins and I used to walk the alleys and pick particularly pretty river-polished agate stones out of the pebbles they’d hauled in to fill holes in the asphalt; the creek I used to ride across on the right-hand horse of the Percheron team that pulled the old tiller or the hay rake, a horse so big I rode astride on his neck—but I was very little then; the creek had quicksand, but if you were sensible and made like a starfish you could work your way out of it. There was the Martian-red sandstone hilltop where we cousins used to arrange ambushes of each other…and where I learned that you do not, unlike in the movies, try to jump from a cliff to an oak sapling. Oak saplings don’t bend like birches, and they have a lot of branches on the way down. I had a most excellent childhood, especially weekends, when we drove 40 miles on a 2-lane to Anadarko to help out our grandparents. I fought a prairie fire with a wet gunnysack, right along with everybody in the area; I learned (with a hand plow in red clay soil) why a horse-drawn plow was really a big advancement (my few furrows looked like a drunken snake had laid them out)—and that if you harvest an entire row of ripe cabbages you are not helping grandma at all! [But popping the stems is so interesting!]<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Has been growing in the office. I waded through a stack of miscellaneous papers, file-ables, bills, end-of-year statements, circulars, catalogs, and the refinance papers, found a slip for taxes on an acreage I inherited in Oklahoma—and couldn’t even find out what year it was for or if it had been paid. There was a phone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":751,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/751"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}