Hillory Oakes:
CLASS OF 1990
Grove High SchoolClass of 1990
Grove, OK
Hillory's Story
Life
Hmm...Well, having purposely avoided the 10-year class reunion, I'm not quite sure what has led me to look around this website late on a summer evening. Everyone's asleep in my house but me, trying to get some work done in a quiet moment by myself. Taking a break to do some idle Googling, I ended up here.
So what do you want to know?
After I got my B.A. at OU, I went to Denver for graduate school and lived there for seven years. I got my M.A. and Ph.D. in English at the University of Denver. From Grove to Norman to Denver: the bigger the city, the more I liked it. Yet now I seem to have gone back a very small town.
Currently I live in Canton, New York--a town in upstate New York that's so upstate that we're only 30 minutes from the Canadian border. Canton is about the size now that Grove was when we were all in kindergarten: the village proper has maybe 4,000 residents, but the two colleges here each have a couple thousand students each.
I teach English and am director of the Writing Center at one of those schools, St. Lawrence University, a private liberal arts college. I've been here four years, coming straight from my Ph.D. program, and find it a wonderful job.
My husband, Robert, [our last names are different] teaches at the other campus in town, the State University of New York at Canton. I met Robert in Denver and somehow charmed him into following me here. Robert is smarter, more talented, and a harder worker than me, so the pressure's really off at home :) He has a book of poetry coming out next month and an anthology he edited coming out next spring. I can't keep up with him!
In August 2005, we had our first baby, a son named Cotton. We swore off teaching summer school or taking on other jobs this year so that we can enjoy at least one summer as a new family.
I actually haven't been to Grove in almost two ye...Expand for more
ars, having gotten only as far as Tulsa at Christmas a few years ago and having avoided traveling last summer while I was pregnant. No offense to any of you still living there, but I don't really miss the town, though of course I wish I could see my parents more often, and I will always miss looking out my childhood bedroom window at the lake.
Actually, I guess it's not true that I don't miss Grove at all--I think, like any person dealing with suddenly being middle-aged, I miss what I remember Grove being at one time--I do miss the quiet, small-town feel it had when we were young, and I do miss some of the beautiful spots on the water. I think one of the reasons that I like Canton, despite its being truly in the middle of nowhere, is that it was easy to slip into small-town living again. Can you believe that here in Canton we (and almost everyone else we know) leave our keys in our car and only lock our house when we go out of town? It's that kind of place, with the added bonus of having a great university here so that the small town is filled with interesting people and lots of opportunities.
The life of the college professor can be incredibly stable...or it can be incredibly chaotic. Right now Robert and I are both enjoying teaching and both love our home, our walks to school, the farmer's market on the town square, the old-time movie theatre and ice-cream stand. We love the idea of Cotton growing up in this environment, so we hope to stay here for a good while. However, maybe some great job will open up for one of us elsewhere, and we'll have to make the hard decision about moving. For now, though, I'm here, 1500 or so miles from Grove, Oklahoma, but, at least until my next birthday, realizing that I've only spent about half my life away from Grove, so some part of me will always be rooted there.
The best to all of you...HILLORY OAKES
Register for Free to view all details!
Yearbooks
Register for Free to view all yearbooks!
Reunions
