They started to become a trend during my senior year of high school in Boston, when our whole family moved there for my mom’s year-long visiting professorship. The girls would wear shiny white cowboy boots with their dresses, and guys paired Stetsons with their plaid. At that point, I’d already stopped considering myself Oklahoman. What’d it matter, I thought, that scuff-free snip-toes now made multiple appearances each year at ‘Western-out’ high school football games, carried over to the college bars, worn from frat formals to Halloween and everything in between?

I forgot how boots looked here – how, according to my dad, they were supposed to look. My eyes jump from shoe to shoe in the airport, leather that looks like you could bend it back on itself toe to sole, dull, creased, specks of dirt. The reddest of red flags that New England spoiled the hell out of me is the internal aversion that fills my body when I see worn boots. I hate the feeling immediately.

I pick up my truck, delivered in one piece, from the parking lot, and begin the drive to my family house. I pass through sprawling Oklahoma City proper first, before taking the exit off the highway to home: Prosperity, Oklahoma.

A lot of people questioned my decision when I first moved to Boston. Everyone in Boston wanted to get out of Boston, and everyone in Oklahoma wanted to get out of Oklahoma. It took me nearly blowing my knee out to realize I wasn’t totally sure which category I fitted into: I didn’t know where I wanted to be any more. All that I knew for certain was that it would be a minute before I could go back to playing pro lacrosse.

And, if I had to spend time elsewhere, Prosperity, college town to the nines, wasn’t a bad choice. This would’ve been my home school in another universe. It’s expansive, flat, with a brick sign at the orange-flower-adorned entrance proclaiming that I’ve entered the University of Oklahoma City, Organized 1864, named for the major city fifteen minutes away in classic American college fashion. The age of the school is evident in the older Gothic campus buildings I pass on my way to the residential area. Swarms of students flood out of lecture halls as classes let out, some wearing those boots that look like they’ve seen enough stables to last a lifetime.