Greetings New Friends (I hope),
After reading several of your blog posts, I feel a bit like Meg Ryan’s character, Kathleen, in my favorite movie (a work of profound brilliance disguised as little more than a romantic comedy), You’ve Got Mail. Meg writes to Joe Fox (Tom Hanks’ character), “Dear friend, I like to start my notes to you as if we're already in the middle of a conversation. I pretend that we are the oldest and dearest friends as opposed to what we actually are. People who don't know each other’s names and met in a chat room where we both claimed we never been before.” Though I do know your names and this isn’t exactly a chat room, the mood remains the same: perfect strangers, sharing life details as though we were the oldest and dearest friends.
I am Nicole Green and it is unfair to introduce myself without also formally introducing my side-kick and monster dog, Pumpkin. Pumpkin, my guide dog and better half, and I reside, by address, in Lincoln’s Near South neighborhood. As of this evening, we have inhabited our charming and “antique” duplex for exactly five days. We are recent transplants from Omaha… or is it Texas… or wait, is it Ashland? As a college student, a summer camp wrangler for six years, a Fulbright Teaching Assistant in Frankfurt, Germany, an equine and special needs programs coordinator at a camp, a graduate student at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, and most recently, a daughter of Patty and Henry Green
in Omaha; I have not maintained a single address for more than nine months over the period of the past nine years.
As an unwilling frequent “mover” and a hater of change (though I seem to continually set myself up for it), I have always been an extremely “place-conscious” person, if you will. Growing up in suburban Omaha—a place I still very much call my home—I always felt acutely aware, firstly, of the strong community that surrounded me (though I graduated with 546 other students, many of them were the same kids with whom I went to kindergarten) and, secondly, that I am “a country girl stuck in a city girl’s body.” When I was very young, I imagined the empty lot in the cul de sac where I lived, was an untilled prairie and it was my job to settle it just like Laura Ingalls Wilder. Around the same time when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would answer “a pioneer,” as if that were a profession one could still go into. While I spent my school months in Omaha, the daughter of a strikingly patriotic 8th Grade American History teacher and a comme
rcial brick salesmen, I spent my summer months in Nebraska’s panhandle.
As the only child both of my parents and in the entire extended family—that’s right, no cousins, and no siblings—while in Gering and Scottsbluff (Mom and Dad were high school sweet hearts) I had only two options for entertainment: A). spend time with the adults, listening to their political debates, driving Grandma’s Harley Davidson golf cart at the golf course, tagging along as Mom and Dad visited old high school friends, or B). I could entertain myself. Grandma’s house, which at 92 she no longer inhabits, was as much home to me as my own suburban ranch. 
From 1600 M Street, I could walk to the Bakery downtown, the “pretty dress shop,” and the park down the street. It was here, despite being legally blind, that I learned to drive and where I learned to ride horses. The riding stuck, the driving did not. I also stood witness to the power of community and the critical value of agriculture. I was with my parents as they visited the very same friends with whom they had graduated and I rode with Grandma Green as she pointed out the sugar beet fields, telling me stories of her childhood spent tending them. I ate cabbage burgers with Grandma Green (the German half of me) and brought black walnut ice cream from the Platte Valley Creamy to Great Grandma at the Veteran’s home.
Now, while the visits to the panhandle have become increasingly less frequent, I’ve transplanted my love of small town life and “the land” to Ashland, Nebraska. Though, I lived there for only 10 months, I worked in the hills of Carol Joy Holling Camp for six summers and thought of it (not my parents suburban house) as home when I was homesick while living in Germany. I still feel most myself when standing at the top of the pasture hill, with its over-grown cedar trees, ancient weather washed wagon, and weed-infested Brome grass. Now that graduate school has called me to a more urban life, I still hold onto these roots by holding onto the reigns of my horse. Starr, or Painted Pig as she is more often called due to her chubby thighs and round belly, was the greatest gift a girl could ask for. After a very hard year in Texas, it seems “Santa” was able to talk the Camp into selling her to my family. And now, the dirt that sticks to my skin and the wind that pulls my hair from its pony tale, as we tear across the harvested fields in the fall, grounds me to the agrarian life I love.
Finally, as a resistant accepter of change, it is strange now, to be back in a state—in a place—that has been home for most of my life and feel as far away from home as my Frankfurt apartment was. After two years in Texas, where I started my Ph.D. and where I was in many ways grateful to leave, I now find myself missing the sunshine of our collective Graduate Instructor office. As I trot past the Governor’s Mansion on my way to Andrews, I find myself sometimes misty-eyed thinking of Meghan, my dearest “grad school friend” and the other half of the emerging scholarly team of “Roe and Green,” and of Carrie, and Brad, and Charlotte, who mentored me. At the moment, it would seem, though I am “at home,” in Nebraska, where my family and oldest friends reside, I am place-less. My communities—those people and spaces that have made me ever feel at home—seem to be on different planes entirely: Parents are gazing wistfully at retirement and caring for aging parents of their own and college and high school friends are busy with husbands, and babies, and medical school. My hope is that in the next three months, the next year, the next five years, I will find my place once again.
