The Life I Wanted
“I’ve always heard that people cry when they move to Midland and cry when they move away,” my sister-in-law Eileen said.
She was trying to make me feel better. It didn’t work.
I was crying, all right. My husband, Jacob; our infant daughter, Cora; and I were about to move to Midland—the hot, dusty hub of West Texas’s sprawling oil and natural gas industries.
Jacob works in industrial automation. He had interviewed for jobs in Colorado, Oregon—and, much to my dismay, with an engineering firm in the West Texas Permian Basin.
He got the Texas job.
I’d grown up in the Texas Panhandle. Even as a child, I yearned to break free from that flat, featureless landscape. In my bedtime prayers, I thanked God for the few trees near our house. I dreamed of moving to “God’s country,” as Papa, my paternal grandfather, called his home state of Washington.
Midland was not God’s country.
It was a skyline of pumpjacks and drilling rigs. Ovenlike summer heat
