I used to live in Colorado. This detail seems to come up in any conversation I have lasting longer than 10 minutes. It’s one of my annoying habits. Just one. I have others. I’m not very good at finishing sentences. Not just sentences. Ideas. Thoughts. Words sometimes. This inability to finish things makes conversation difficult and often people seem frustrated with me. It’s also why I never seriously thought I’d be a very good writer. Stories should have endings, so I’m told. I’m not sure why I do it. Often my sentence, my mouth, is still on the topic at hand, buy my thoughts are already off on another tangent. It’s exhausting. I’m sure many other people have this problem. I like to think they are just better at hiding it than I am. I used to be a good hider. When life is less stressful, I seem much more in control of things. When I was 10, I always found the best hiding places when playing hide-and-go-seek with my 7-year-old sister. I don’t even remember where it was that I hid; I just remember my cunning ability
to hide. In fact, I may not have been very good at hiding after all. I just have the memory of lording my superiority over my sister.
I’m smarter. I hide better. She’s small, but she’ll never outwit me. She really is small. I heard a line from a movie once about a girl being a “little pocket rocket.” I don’t remember the movie, but that line fits the way I saw her perfectly. She’s tiny, cute, and she had a temper. I keep this in the past tense to avoid any confusion about what she is now. This is what she was. Now I just miss her. She still lives in Colorado. Although she recently confessed to my mom that she wanted to move to California, that trip has thankfully been put off at least until she graduates from college. She could graduate in a year. Who really finishes in four years anymore? My mom is glad she won’t be moving just yet. It was hard enough for my mom when I left.
I used to live in Colorado. The first twenty-three years of my life. Twenty-three and change. Three months of pocket change. I just turned twenty-four. Now I live in Iowa. Whenever I tell people this who do not live in Iowa, the usual reaction I get is a nose wrinkle. Or a blank stare. Or an: “Iowa? What’s in Iowa?” What is in Iowa? I don’t actually know. Well I know a little. Stinky hog-confinements; I just recently learned what a hog-confinement was, and let me tell you, I was less than thrilled. It’s exactly like it sounds. A big barn structure with hogs lined up end-to-end, and probably stacked one on top of the other. However, I’ve been told that the lack of exercise makes them
juicer. Well thank goodness for that. I like cows better anyway, so lets save any of your cow confinements stories until after I find out about Santa Clause; I’m betting that his belly doesn’t really shake like a bowl full of jelly, but please, don’t spoil it for me. Iowa also has, in case you were wondering, a lot of corn. And soybeans. Curiously, though, I haven’t seen much of it. Or the hog confinements. I stick mostly to the “highly” populated areas of Iowa, and pigs, corn, and soybeans don’t make chatty neighbors. I heard a rumor, probably not true, that there is more of a profit in using corn as a renewable fuel source than selling it as a tasty snack. If in fact this is true, cool, but I thought I should put the disclaimer in there just in case. I don’t want to get a bad rep. Iowa also has polite drivers. Polite people. Polite drivers. This means that if you would like to get over on the Interstate, most people will let you get over. This also means that if you are stopped at a four-way stop, and the car to your right got to the stop sign a little ahead of you, s/he will wave at you until you go.
No, no, I insist, you go. It’s annoying. I don’t know why it annoys me so much. It probably has to do with the fact that where I came from, everyone has instant replay in their heads, and everyone always knows whose turn it is at the four-way stop.
I used to live in Colorado. Colorado, where everyone drives perfectly. Yep. Doesn’t that just sound like the biggest bunch of crap? When I left Colorado, it was for a lot of reasons. I always get the: “Why would anyone leave Colorado?” If I had lived in Iowa for the first twenty-three years of my life and then moved to Colorado, I have a feeling I’d be writing about how Colorado drivers annoy me, and the tag for this rambling would have been: “I used to live in Iowa.” It’s mostly just part of my personality. I like to know that I have something colorful and interesting to offer to a conversation. Where I’m from is a part of what makes me different. I always wanted to show my sister that I could beat her, and Colorado is my competition with others. I’m the annoying kid on the playground that just moved who wont stop saying things like: “Well in Colorado,” “This one time, in Colorado,” and “Colorado is so much better than this because…” And yes, Colorado is beautiful. The mountains are gorgeous. It isn’t very humid, so even when it gets hot in the summer, it’s really not so bad; I can say that, having experienced summer days in the Carolinas, Nebraska, and now Iowa. I can’t sleep when I get really hot. Most nights, in the summer, the temperature in Colorado drops back down to the 50s and 60s because there isn’t humidity holding down the heat. The air is a lot thinner. Most cities along the Front Range, like Denver, are around 5,000 feet above sea level. Thinner atmosphere up there. My aunt Amy made a comment once that it felt like you could never quite catch your breath, that there was no substance to the air. I always thought summers in Nebraska, where she’s from, were suffocating. There was too much pressure in the air, and I felt like my lungs couldn’t filter through the soupy oxygen I was trying to breath in. I found out later that people in higher elevations develop elevated levels of red blood cells. This enables us to work with our “limited oxygen” air, which I’m guessing is why athletes who have to compete at high altitudes will go to the location weeks in advance to “acclimate” themselves. However, as much as I miss all this stuff about Colorado, what I miss the most is my family and old friends. The real kicker is that part of me wanted to move somewhere new
for the change. I wouldn’t call myself a thrill-seeker, but I do love adrenaline. This is why I allow myself obsessions and why I think anticipation is one of the great experiences. Thus I need many things to anticipate. I used to think that I was cheating myself by always looking forward to things. I thought I just had to remember the phrase,
live for the moment. I guess that all depends on how you look at it. I’ve discovered, however, that I’m usually the happiest when I’m looking forward to something. I don’t know how to say it in a way that doesn’t sound like a corny Hallmark greeting. I love that when I go to the card store, often Hallmark, a part of me is looking for something that screams: “This is the perfect card from me to you.” Well why wouldn’t something so mass-produced scream that to the people I love? Most of the people I love don’t live in Colorado anymore. I thought moving away would be an adventure. And it was. Adventures are great for adrenaline. I got to thrive on that idea for about 8 months. It was wonderful; 8 months of feeling like my life was going somewhere, without leaving my low-paying job. I was going to grad school. That meant that I wasn’t a loser anymore. In those 8 months my life had direction. My grandparents were proud of me, something that I still like to think about.
I used to live in Colorado. Now I live in Iowa. The problem with going on adventures is that you meet people you will eventually miss, and you miss people who were appendages to your last adventure. I’m now in the lazy summer between my two years as a graduate student. Pretty soon I’m going to need another plan, something else to thrive on. Right now, I see a lot of the past.
I used to live in Colorado.
