Once Old Yeller is out of earshot, the ranch is silent save for the sounds of the animals behind me, cattle lowing and horses huffing. People know our Veracruz Ranch as some sort of oasis in the middle of the endless Oklahoma plains, an untouched space where we live off the land and ride our horses to get to the feed store or something, but I like to think it’s not much different from any other way of life. We’ve got our chores, our friends, our family dinners, and our community. All that’s changed is the context.

At least, that’s the way I’ll run things when the responsibility of the ranch eventually falls to me. It’s part of the reason I chose to study meteorology. The work will keep me at home, where I can have an eye on the ranch at all times.

I finish putting the feed out for the cows. Later, my dad will graze them – our cattle are pretty spoiled, to be honest – but for now, my job is done. I grab my backpack, toss it into my truck, and head to campus for my first class of the day. I wish I could take it all lightly, like it’s any other day of my college career, but I can’t. My hands are shaking when I clutch the steering wheel of my Ram. It’s the morning of my last college lacrosse season opener, and I’m not sure quite how to feel. After Coach had us doing Colt’s goal clinics for a week, honing the very skills I’d struggled with last year, I should probably be feeling more confident. But I can’t decide if this is an end, a beginning, or both.

My dreaded Instrumentation class takes place in the University of Oklahoma City’s Department of Meteorology. One of the newest buildings on the otherwise aged campus, the Meteorology Hub looms both tall and long, copious amounts of glass coupled with brick. I elbow my way through the double doors that lead directly down to the main lecture hall, already packed with just under eighty Meteorology students. Our programme is small but prestigious. We started with full lecture halls of two hundred plus freshmen, and in unfortunately typical STEM major fashion, have come down to fewer than a hundred seniors getting ready to graduate this coming spring. Like most science-based majors, rough weed-out classes, and later on, upperclassman research projects, are designed to thin out the crowd.

I toss my bag in front of me and push my seat in the third row with an overly dramatic squeak. At first, I think it’s the fact that I’ve come in rattling and thudding that causes a couple of people to glance my way.