A good friend asked me the other day if I still love Oklahoma. What a cool question.

And I guess I haven't thought consciously about the answer, but here it is: I love Oklahoma more now than ever before. Which I know for lots of you who have been reading this blog for the five years since I started it would be difficult to imagine, given what a booster I've always been (Blake Ewing once called me an eternal optimist—which I think gets pretty close to the heart of it). What's happened is that my love of my state as a whole has deepened. The Tulsa area will always be home. But I've fallen in love with the red dirt and impossible skies of western Oklahoma. And the hills and craggy roadside reliefs in the south. And rowdy Oklahoma City in the middle of it all. 

I feel like my experience of Oklahoma as a child was whitewashed in a lot of ways. We didn't spend a lot of time outside. We didn't go to rodeos or powwows or catfish frys. Both of my parents come from not-so-functional households of white, blue-collar Oklahoma, raised by fathers who made choices on a regular basis that ultimately tore down their families. They did their best to sanitize our lives of some of the not-so-savory things that, historically, have been held up by that culture—ignorance, intolerance, racism. I didn't realize that I was a fifth-generation Oklahoman until I was an adult, mostly because being for so long rooted here hasn't been considered worthy to be a point of pride. I wasn't churched. I didn't fish. I'd never shot a gun until I was 23. I rode horses, but only at summer camp. I started this blog at the moment I discovered that I lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And through my work and new friendships made possible by this little corner of the Internet, my understanding of what it means to live one's life with this place as its setting has been deepening ever since.

I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't mention how really frustrated I get with this place. I'm often embarrassed, sometimes even afraid of the policies pushed by most of our state and national representatives. Continued self-segregation causes inexpressible and permanent harm to our diversity, our economy, our built environment. I'm disappointed that buy-in to what's happening in downtown Tulsa didn't come sooner. I go crazy when my friends complain about parking. 

But my editor said something cool the other day about how he loves his wife, even though she's a trainwreck. 