Caitlin Cook
Bio
Stories (2/0)
A Love Letter to the Worst Town in America
“We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.”
By Caitlin Cook6 years ago in Wander
Hard to Love
As a woman, I was put at a large disadvantage when my family left the clean, inviting air of metropolitan Omaha, Nebraska and landed in the barren, rustic air of southeastern Ohio. Six-year-old Caitlin cheered as we passed the “Welcome to Ohio” sign on the highway, boxes rubbing against my legs and my cat’s cries booming through the holes on his pet taxi. I was always up for new adventures at that point in my life, but it wasn’t long before I found that the woodland creatures in my backyard could not speak to me, and probably wouldn’t even if they could. Living there was like being a bird with a broken wing and stuffed into a cardboard box with a few holes in it, like the excessive amount of trees lining the area served to block any view of the rest of the world. The sweet Nebraska plains were not nearly so stifling. My eyes could see so far into the wide when the wind wasn’t forcing them shut. There wasn’t much to see, but I could see it. In my new home, the abandoned dirt roads were our busy sidewalks, the moos of cows were our honking horns, and the churches were our skyscrapers.
By Caitlin Cook7 years ago in Humans