Near our house is the old municipal airstrip which is right next to the new municipal airstrip and hangars for the little planes. My mother’s father ran the airstrip for years even as far back as WWII, though I did not ever meet him because he was dead way before I came. He was also a doughboy. My mother has lots of pictures.
My mother’s mother is called mom-mom and she lives in half of our house. It’s a duplex. It looks like two identical houses stuck together, conjoined houses, or like what polygamist houses in Utah look like. My mother lived in Utah once for a couple of months, and she loved it but my dad hated it and so they moved back to Oklahoma. This is the bane of my mother’s existence. But there are no polygamist houses in Oklahoma, because there are no Mormons. At least no one tells me about it if there are.
Mom-mom lets my parents tear down her little white clapboard cottage and build this ranch-style conjoined monstrosity in place of it so everyone has a place to live. She has a whole half, with her own kitchen, and her own TV. If you walk through my room and through my brother’s room you get to a hallway that connects to her half of the house, which is the mirror version of our half of the house. Every night for dinner my brother goes in and gets her and walks her through both our rooms while she leans on his arm. She has Parkinson’s and though her mind is sharp she has no language. She is paper-thin, and her skin is paper-thin, and she wears a lot of paper-thin house dresses that you can see her spindly legs through when the light is behind her. But for now, she can walk fine if she leans on someone’s arm.
The old airstrip looks like a field. It is all split through with Bermuda grass and Queen Anne’s lace, and Indian paintbrush and whatever those white flowers are that smell nice but are filled with ants. We take walks there, even sometimes with mom-mom who my mother understands really well even though she’s got no language. Sometimes my brother comes and has his skateboard and goes off away from everyone. Every month is a different wildflower in bloom, and I like to snatch and grab everything, regardless of the ants. I like to run off far away from the group, but no one lets me get far without screaming. My mother can’t go so fast because she is the arm that mom-mom leans on. She screams bloody murder when I get out of sight in the tall grass and makes my brother come after me which makes him furious. I am never allowed to get far, despite trying. If we get far enough there is a pond. Mom-mom does not go far, so the pond is something very distant, very hard to imagine. I am ready to get far. To get way far from here.
Once during this time, my dad gets the idea to grow a beard and grows a beard. It seems nice, but I don’t think it is popular with anyone but me.
Once during this time, my dad gets the idea to buy a motorcycle, and buys one and takes me on exactly one trip on the back of it down the airport road, past the old airstrip and the new airstrip and past the pond to the end of the road with the control tower and all the hangars made of corrugated tin, and there the road just ends in a field, and we get all the way to the end of the road and then have to make a circle, and then he brings me home, and after that no more motorcycle.