For Jess, turning nine on that Oklahoma compound was not a celebration of her youth; it was simply another year of her small shoulders handling the weight of the same red clay that swallowed generations before her.
She told us stories of how her Grammy Max would wake her and her sister, Bandi, in the dark—well before the sun crested the eastern horizon—dragging them half-asleep along her daily morning routine. She described the Oklahoman air and how it would already be sweltering and breathless, heavy with a thick summer dew that felt less like moisture and more like oil that filled the earth below them, before the sun could even touch the middle of the skyline. Jess mentioned the recognizable tunes that seemed to follow the morning sun—dozens of cicadas erupting into their relentless, metallic chorus, screaming from the black walnut trees under waves of amber dawn light.
On the surface, all seemed peaceful along this long stretch of desolate land leading up to their deceptive steps. The red-tinged dust had settled over long-forgotten, decaying fence posts that stretched beyond the horizon endlessly in every direction, cutting underneath a pale blue, white-capped sky that reminded her of the distant, calming waves of the endless oceans she had dreamed of all her life. Dolphins became her totem—her light in the never-ending darkness. She had so many dolphin figurines when I was a small child, and I could never grasp why she connected with them so well.
Jess would describe the way the girls had been shaped in that unforgettable, blistering plains sunlight, far from the rest of the world. She had endured the exact same trials as the wild prairie roses rooted in the roadside ditches. Bordering the cracked dirt back roads Jess and Bandi walked as young children, those flowers kept their thorns angled to protect their delicate petals—much like Jess had learned. Her instincts were locked onto survival, forcing her to flourish through a fierce, unyielding resilience.
These overgrown, prickly vines were the very same stubborn roses Jess’s great-great-grandparents, Henry and Margaret, had watched take root decades before. Like those wildflowers, my mother was tough and thorny, but she had also been forced to draw life from the unforgiving, bone-dry soil her family had endured—yet she possessed a striking beauty handed down just as fiercely. I remember Jess telling me how this deep-seated pain had not been born overnight. It had been carved into her soul by her own childhood, gouged from the broken bloodline that had preceded her.
As I began discovering our ancestral story, I learned it had all begun generations ago with the quiet perseverance of a family curse, flowing continuously down through the unbroken ancestral line with an unknown origin and absolutely no signs of an end. The cadence was always the same: another new destination, another sudden, devastating relocation, another transient family with a new patriarch. Their environment constantly drifted, yet the underlying reality remained heartbreakingly petrified.
Amidst the endless, sun-bleached prairie fields, the two little girls had spent their childhood growing, tucked away from the scorching heat. Those fields stretched out in every direction like a vast, rust-colored ocean, bordered by tangled thickets of wild plum bushes and fields of tall blue-stem grass that hissed like dry paper every time the southern wind swept across the plains. They felt trapped more than free. They could go, but where? The land was so incredibly vast.
Out here, beneath a blinding, copper-hued sky, the world felt simultaneously limitless and suffocating. The two sisters would spend countless hours wandering through the high, razor-edged grass and past sun-faded cow skulls, kicking up fine plumes of iron-red dust that clung to their bare legs and dyed their shoes red.
Years later, after my mother passed away and I had the opportunity to talk directly with my aunt Bandi, I began to understand the quiet tension that had lived between them back then. Bandi hadn’t been trying to pester her out of malice; she had simply been searching for scraps of attention and affection, idolizing her big sister for the way she had already mastered survival. But Bandi didn’t realize that Jess was navigating a world she was never meant to cross alone. Stripped of any real childhood, carrying the absence of their eldest sister, Terrie, the role of protector fell entirely onto tiny shoulders entirely too small to hold such unconscionable weight. In grandma Winnia’s eyes though, her youngest daughter could do no wrong.
The girls had been forced to thrive under the watchful, instinctive eyes of Grammy Max until they came of age to make their own pathways. Grammy Max took note of every unsettling argument, especially the way their mother dragged the girls along while she worked.
The hard work of the day only gave way to the dread of the night. Those nights blurred together into a suffocating routine as Winnia packed her girls into her battered Volkswagen, heading out to meet complete strangers under the dead of night. The car interior always smelled of stale cigarette smoke, baking vinyl, and the faint, coppery tang of spilled soda lingering on the floorboards. As the hours crept on and the sun turned to cold, indifferent stars, Jess and Bandi never knew when their mother would finally return from the dark.
Jess would tell me about how Bandi would usually succumb to exhaustion first, her small body curled awkwardly across the cracked backseat, fast asleep and breathing softly against Jess’s lap. Being Bandi’s protector meant Jess had to stay wide awake. She would stare out the fogged-up window into the pitch-black shadows of unfamiliar parking lots or desolate back roads, her heart hammering a nervous rhythm against her ribs. She’d listen to the distant hum of highway traffic and the phantom creaks of the car chassis cooling in the night air, guarding her sleeping sister like a sentry. She carried a quiet, crushing terror that this time, when the car door opened, it wouldn’t be their mother—that they would be left truly alone in the dark. Unprotected.
By the time the eastern horizon began to bleed a pale, bruised violet and their mother finally slid back behind the steering wheel with a weary sigh, the sun would be returning—forcing them straight back home with just enough time to scurry off to school. The girls had mastered pretending to the outside world that everything was normal, while their mother, Winnia, would use the daylight hours for her rest.
Grammy Max tried to ground them against the shadows, roping her granddaughters into the daily rhythm of the land. Jess, the middle child, took to the soil and the animals most naturally. Possessing a soft soul and a fiercely compassionate heart, Jess found comfort in the predictable, rhythmic responsibility of nurturing helpless creatures—even when what she needed most was someone to nurture her.
Jess also told me how during the scorching summer months, Gram would take a pre-teen Jess out back to the towering chain-link pens. The air out by the pens always carried a sharp, distinct musk—a mixture of trampled dirt, feed grain, and the wild, prehistoric presence of the towering birds. Grammy Max used these quiet, punishing moments in time to pass down vital life lessons to her two granddaughters, attempting to forge a shield around them, guiding them away from the repeating cycles of the past.
On one sweltering morning, after Jess and Bandi had spent hours hauling heavy galvanized feed buckets across the sprawling land, Grammy Max paused. She wiped a line of sweat from her sun-spotted forehead with the back of one of her calloused hands, looking long and hard at Jess. The girls had just spent the early morning picking out switches because they couldn’t get along—a moment Jess never forgot, nor fully forgave, after ending up with the thin, fragile stick while Bandi picked a more substantial one.
When it was said and done, Gram told her that while she was growing older, she needed to understand something vital about the world they lived in: even though Jess saw beauty and innocence in every injured creature she tried to save, there was an immense, quiet evil out there that would try to turn that very beauty against her—including the unpredictable darkness within her own mother. Jess listened, absorbing every hard-edged word as the massive emus paced restlessly behind the wire. She understood the warning down to her marrow, and from that day forward, she armored herself as best she could against all the ugliness clawing at the edges of her life.
After Grammy Max finished her warning, the silence that settled between them felt heavier than the galvanized buckets hanging from their aching fingers. The sun was beginning its relentless descent into the complete darkness that would soon blanket everything around them.
Without another word, Gram turned back toward the weathered farmhouse, her boots crunching steadily against the soil heated by the long, exhausting afternoon. Jess lingered for a moment longer by the high wire fence. She watched the towering emus blink their prehistoric eyes, feeling a cold shiver run straight through her despite the sweltering heat of the mid-evening pressing down on her shoulders. She gazed out past the northern property line, scanning the endless fields of tall blue-stem grass and rusted fence posts that seemed to stretch into eternity.
Turning away from the pens, Jess began the long, solitary walk back across the compound. Every step kicked up a fine, choking plume of iron-red dust that settled over her bare legs, clinging stubbornly to her skin like a brand. It was the same red dust that had coated Ophir’s boots decades before, the same red dust that had drifted through the air during the merciless years of the Dust Bowl, and the same red dust that now caked the floorboards of their mother’s battered Volkswagen. The earth itself felt alive with history—a relentless, breathing entity that demanded sacrifice from every woman born into its grip.
As she crossed the gravel yard toward the main house, the darkness of the night grew ever more pressing. She thought of her little sister, Bandi, waiting for her return, and a sudden, fierce flash of guilt flared in her chest for the way she had snapped that morning. Bandi didn’t understand the shadows. She didn’t know why their mother looked at them the way she did, or why they had to spend their nights hiding in the backseat of a car while the rest of the world slept safely behind locked doors. Bandi only knew she wanted love, and Jess, despite her own raw, unhealed wounds, was the only shield her little sister had.
Jess paused on the creaking wooden porch steps, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her wrist. She looked down at her hands—small, calloused, and already bearing the quiet strength of the land. The realization settled deep into her bones with a crushing, absolute clarity: the generational curse wasn’t just a bedtime story or a ghost from the past; it was a living, breathing weight resting squarely on her own young shoulders. Her mother, trapped in a cycle of dark choices and wandering roads, had been forged in this exact same crucible. She had also survived through sheer, unyielding defiance, even when the world tried to grind her into dust.
A hot, dry southern wind swept across the plains, hissing through the dry plum bushes and carrying the distant, familiar scent of dust and rain-less skies. Jess took a deep, steadying breath, squaring her shoulders against the oppressive weight of the legacy she had inherited. The road ahead of her was terrifying and uncertain, tangled with thorns just like the wild prairie roses blooming stubbornly in the borrow pits. But as she gripped the splintered wooden railing of the porch and pushed open the screen door, a quiet, unshakable resolve hardened inside her heart. They could try to break her, the prairies could try to bury her, and the dark cycles of her bloodline could try to claim her soul—but Jess was ready. She would survive, she would protect her sister, and she would write her own ending to a story that started long before she ever drew her first breath.