It took me a few seconds to realize what I saw at the base of the trees surrounding the party's venue. It was the light of fireflies, blinking on and off as they hovered through the brush. I had never seen them before, and I was struck by the magic of the place created at the base of the trees and not back at the party, where the music was loud enough to shake the centerpieces off their mirrored bases.

I had never been to Oklahoma before. We were invited to a quinceanera and decided to be the cool parents who take the kids to a family gathering, and include hours of driving through the plains, instead of flying them to the beach or Disneyland. As the best hype person in the house, I had been singing a truncated line from the musical that bares the state's name to the kids to the point of eye rolls.

It turns out I was wrong about the lyric, which isn't in that song, and now I've led my children down a path investigating the Mandela Effect when they try to spout that wrong lyric to others in the future. But I figure that's a part of childhood, too, just like playing Battleship in the backseat of a car and asking how many more hours we had left.

As we traveled through the Texas panhandle that still felt familiar to me, having lived in a Texas border town in New Mexico during high school, and headed into the more sloping landscape of Oklahoma, the cityscape suddenly created more familiarity, the staples of a strip mall: a Ross, a Marshall's and rightly, a Staples.

"Well, that's Americana for you," I said to my husband, who entertained me for a few more miles about the barren nature of our urban design. Think: Paving paradise to put up a parking lot. On the one hand, I will know exactly where the bathrooms in Ross will be. On the other hand, why was that the representation of the city as we drove by?

After a stop at the hotel and a stop at the church with a bit more character, we headed to the party portion of the trip. The venue was a newish building adjacent to a wide-open grass lawn set in a beautiful grove of trees that popped up out of nowhere as we drove through the Oklahoma farmland. It was swanky, with large chandeliers and calligraphy on signs to point you to the bar or the photo booth. There was a lot of white starkness and barn doors popular with the millennial set.

While my husband caught up with cousins, I leaned into being the underdressed "tia" who takes off her shoes and finds the game of horseshoes buried in the grass. At first, it was just me and my kids who played. Then came a four-year-old cousin, enamored with my two "big" kids, who brought her grandfather with practiced horseshoe grip. We then lured in another far-related cousin who hesitantly watched before joining in, pressed into service by the 4-year-old who dutifully distributed the horseshoes. With the connections started, I could wander around the edge of the tree line.

The fireflies gave character, like an ancient tree that was the masterpiece backdrop for the ceremonial area of the venue, with rows of benches holding court in front of it and where you knew many couples made promises to each other that the tree heard too.

I realized what the building of the venue lacked; it was authenticity. It was hiding in its sterility, a concept of posh, instead of the "century-old" farmstead that was there before, per its website. What made it unique is what grew to be there, not what was forced into creation.

It reminded me of the familiar strip malls; they were places that can never gain authenticity and will never truly represent a community. For the needs they may fulfill, how can we help create the authenticity that represents us?

We vote with our wallets. We make an extra stop at a different bakery. We decide to make a pit stop at a boutique that curiously has a VW bug cut in half and placed on the sides of the building. (That's in Roswell, New Mexico.)

We look to the edges where the flashes of effort are hidden and not to where the neon lights demand us to go.

Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at cassie@mcclurepublications.com. To find out more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Chris Lawton at Unsplash