Natasha Fondren

I can’t get over the sky. Maybe you have to live your whole life in Ohio to understand. Where I come from, the land of hills and trees is bigger than the sky, and there are maybe only three or four completely cloudless days all year long. Even then, when you look up, you see only snatches of blue in between the trees and the next hill or the next building.

Yesterday, I was stunned by the sky in Oklahoma.

Probably someone from Oklahoma thinks nothing of the breadth of the sky. Probably someone who’d lived in Oklahoma all their life would come to Ohio and think the sky small. They’d think it tiny. Microscopic. A two-inch patch in a six-foot painting.

Paul Greci just wrote about perspective in Through Whose Eyes Do We See?

But today I am convinced that Chicken Little was from Texas. The sky is so huge, it’s oppressive. The sky is low to the ground. It makes me claustrophobic. I thought the sky went on forever yesterday, but that was nothing.

In Texas, you can reach up and touch the sky. You have to duck. The horizon is every where you look. You can stand and turn a full circle, and in every direction, the horizon never ends.

Also, there are Taco Buenos. I bit into a Cheesecake Chimichanga and almost died. (No, seriously, I had a big asthma attack from the dairy.) But I bit into it and all this cinnamon-y caramel gushed out next to this hot melted cheesecake and I orgasmed and it was so worth the almost-dying bit.

You think I’m kidding about the orgasm.

The American West is a beautiful place.