Chelsea Yates

The Sister hunkered down in my little brother’s sled, gathering her habit around her, the rubber soles of her nurses’ shoes squeaking against the plastic.

I didn’t leave my apartment the Saturday before Ike made landfall. I didn’t know anyone in the city, and I had nowhere to go. Only in the early hours of the morning did I finally decide to shelter in the closet.

I leave Eppley Airfield in a rented Nissan, briefly heading north from Omaha on I-29, then cutting west and picking up Highway 275 just south of Fremont. Blanketed in corn, soybeans, hay, and alfalfa, the land silently pulses as I drive, following a course set by the Elkhorn River.

My mother’s family is buried in a little cemetery at the edge of Magnolia, Iowa, population 175. It’s about forty minutes north of Omaha. “Don’t blink or you’ll miss it,” my dad used to say. Mom’s parents lay there, encircled by generations of relatives. Most had worked the surrounding land, their farms scattered across the Missouri River Valley.

In the fall of 1994, I fell under the spell of two powerful forces: love and Music. Not lower-case music; that had hooked me years before, but Music, as in the debut studio album released by 311 the previous year. For me, growing up in northeast Nebraska in the 1990s, Music came to symbolize teenage love and state pride—emotions I never imagined would matter to me as much as they did.

One of the last times I saw my dad, he gave me his old record player. I was visiting my parents and mentioned that I had been looking to buy one. Dad told me I could have his. With it came the offer to take any of his old albums.

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