MY PLACES

OMAHA

Nineteen years ago this month, I arrived in Omaha from small-town Kansas for my freshman year in college. Three colleges, three degrees, and thirteen years of teaching later, I’ve lived in Nebraska longer than anywhere else and longer than I’d imagined.

For the last five years, I’ve lived in midtown Omaha. My quiet street is lined with small homes, 50 – 80 years old, and widely varying in appearance. My house it the tiny gray-blue two-story house (that looks a lot like another gray-blue two-story house in Kansas). My neighbors Bill and Floss across the street, who moved into their house as newlyweds 60 years ago, tell stories of when our street was a graveled dead end. Other neighborhood folk include Bill’s elderly sister, medical students in Omaha for four years, and a good deal of us in our affordable starter homes, earning an education in mortgages and home maintenance.

Nearby are the University of Nebraska—Omaha campus, the nationally recognized University of Nebraska Medical Center, and the Lied Transplant Center. Blocks away are Nebraska originals Runza and Valentino’s, as are Subway, Burger King, and Arby’s. On the same stretch of the busy Center Street are Omaha’s own Gorat’s, Warren Buffet’s favorite steakhouse, and Petrow’s, a local diner.

KANSAS

Home, for me, will always be Kansas. In a south-central Kansas wheat field is a gray-blue former farmhouse. This is the house where my family drove for every summer vacation from our Illinois home until we moved to Kansas when in 1982 when I was 10. This is the house my parents purchased from my grandmother in 1988 when I was 16. This is the home where I returned every summer during college and multiple times every year since. This is the house where annual holiday family gatherings included zwieback, borscht, pluma moos, crullers, and late night conversations with a mom and four adult daughters.

This is the house where my mom grew up in the 1940’s and 1950’s. This is the house where my grandfather was born in 1897 and died in his sleep in 1981. This is the house my great-grandfather built after immigrating with a large group of other Russian Mennonites of Dutch heritage.

LURKING PLACES

Farther back in memory is suburban Chicago, the place of my childhood, and south Texas, the place beyond my memory but listed on my birth certificate and my passport. Southeastern Illinois and eastern Indiana, the places of my Swiss Mennonite paternal grandparents, lurk somewhere in the depths of my roots.

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PAPILLION-LA VISTA HIGH SCHOOL

Thirteen years ago in1996, I signed my first teaching contract with Papillion-LaVista High School. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with these suburban Omaha students, teaching primarily AP (Advanced Placement) Literature & Composition and Creative Writing courses.

Papillion (pop. 19000) and LaVista (pop. 14000) are two relatively small contiguous suburbs on the southern edge of the Omaha metropolis. The two communities serve as bedroom communities for the many large corporations and businesses of the larger Omaha area, as well as the Offutt Air Force Base on the southern edge of the Omaha area. The northern boundary is just 10 minutes away from the Old Market, UNMC, the Qwest Center, and the Sokol Auditorium. The southern edge of Papillion borders clear rural landscape—vast acres of cornfields, working farms with large barns and tall silos, and even a heard of buffalo.

Papillion’s website advertises itself as offering a “healthy economic climate, lowest crime rate in the state, productive work force”, while LaVista claims to be “one of the fastest growing cities in the State of Nebraska”. In 2009, Papillion was voted number three of the top 10 cities in America in which to live in a poll conducted by Money Magazine and CNN.com. Both suburbs are indeed experiencing a rapid growth of their commercial, industrial, and residential areas.

STUDENT POPULATION

The student population at Papillion-LaVista High school reflects the general population of its two suburbs. Students are largely white and middle class. Less than half of these students have lived in suburban Omaha for more than 10 years, their parents migrating to these suburbs seeking better jobs. As a community closely tied to a nearby US Air Force base, a notable share of students have lived the mobile life of military dependents. The other half have multi-generational ties to the Omaha metro area.

PLACE-CONSCIOUS WORK

My first work with the Nebraska Writing Project in the summer of 2001 included my first Deep Map and some deep-mapping poetry. Since then I’ve created many deep-maps, each exploring a different city, state, or building place that has become part of me.

Since 2005, I’ve been doing a variety of place-conscious work with my students. Ted Kooser’s 2004-06 appointment as US Poet Laureate, and especially his poem “So This is Nebraska”, were the impetus for my students and me to explore our suburban Nebraska place. Even more intriguing have been the last two years and the place inquiry study my students have enacted, thinking about how living in our suburban Nebraska place shapes us—and the possibilities for us to shape our place.

PLACE-CONSCIOUS TEACHING COURSE

My fascination with my own place experience, the place experience of my peers, as well as the impact of place-conscious teaching in my classroom make the possibilities for this course incredibly intriguing.

PLACE-CONSCIOUS POETRY

Below is some poetry I’ve started as a result of thinking about my places. . .

DEEP MAPPING—OMAHA (2004)
I'm not a native Nebraskan.
I'm not a native anything.
Lived in five states, eight cities
Texas, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas
Then landed in Omaha

What’s so great about Omaha?
No breathtaking scenery, balmy weather.
I haven’t caught Husker fever.
The muddy Missouri river front
Far cry from forests, beaches, mountains.

Just this fall, after living in my first-owned-house
I found myself telling my mom
In Kansas
I can't leave Omaha.
I like who I've become here
And I don't want to leave.

Omaha has been the healing warmth
Of true friendship
The receptive soil that fed the roots
I planted

Omaha is teaching
Teaching at Papillion LaVista High School.
The walls are home.
Where I spend my days, my evenings, my nights
I've seen all 24 hours here.
Omaha is my PLHS family.
We've bonded through births,
marriages, marital problems, divorces,
infertility, broken bones, chronic illnesses,
automobile accidents,
Deaths.

Omaha is the place of many firsts
First cars, first house, first real-job
First identities
College-student, adult, college graduate, aunt
High-school teacher, college professor

Omaha
The deepest place on the deep map of my life.

PLACE AND STORY

I. The Illinois town

Trees lined every street

With massive trunks and sturdy branches

Some days we'd climb in my backyard

Other days they'd shade our sandbox-play-restaurant

Canopy the expansive parks

Lush green grass

A deep carpet underneath my swing set

Mysterious forests for hiking on field trips

Steady, strong, hovering, protecting

My childhood
Holding magic in what their maze of leaf clumps

Walking tree-lined streets

With my mom and sisters

To the library

Rooms stacking shelves of adventures waiting

Inhaling thick parched paper and ink

Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, the Boxcar Children

Still today on tree-lined bungalow streets

I see where Nancy and the Hardys lived.

II. The Kansas town

High-up blue summer skies

Beating the blacktop into mushy tar

Spindly trees and small leaves waving feebly from bony fingers.

Brown grass, dry and spiking

Riding my bike in 100 degree heat

To the little public library

Plastic bags of books swinging from the bars

Still stuck with Nancy and the Hardys

Found the one shelf of young adult romance

Shades began falling from my childhood eyes

The bright fluorescent adult world

And my spindling struggles against

The beating sun of clichés and jokes I didn't understand

And the spiking jabs of their drab brown world

Where I didn't want to be

III. But in the Kansas countryside

Soft, yet coarse buffalo grass

Oak trees, leaves twinkling in the searing sun

White-chalky gravel roads and green hedge-clumped rows

The old white farmhouse and the red barn

The shelter belt and the outhouse

The stuff of old summer vacations and

Long-ago bedtime stories of my mom's childhood

And enchanting tales of ancestors

In the country church graveyard

Tall white headstones of

Heroic immigrant grandparents carving new lives

The black headstone of the 1960’s woman shot by her husband

IV. And what is Nebraska?

Omaha is hills that pull my tendons and suck my breath

Hills elevate fading buildings that block sunsets and storm skies

Bluffs and rolling plains

Plus a river

Between Omaha and Lincoln

Stories of far-off sandhills and cornfields

That aren't my Nebraska

A place where I no longer read anything

But student essays

But I'm living stories that are my own

And no one else's

And I'm writing my own

Poem-stories

City lights and excitement

Adult life, opportunity, freedom