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My grandmother was born in 1903, four years before Oklahoma became a state. She was the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher/farmer and a homemaker. She never learned to drive a car and she raised six children in a hardscrabble existence in cheap oilfield renthouses. My mother was the second to the youngest in the family and her memories of her childhood are ingrained deep into my mind as she was a born storyteller. Recently her stories became warped by mental illness and no longer are accessible to me, but I have them in my head, where they really count.

My grandfather was a medic in the Army in World War I. I have always wondered what that would have been like. He died when I was three years old and so his history is lost to me forever. Apparently he had some issues with depression and alcohol and my grandmother lived the life of a single parent most of the time.

I live not far from the part of the county where my mother, uncles and aunt grew up. Not much but sandstone, scrub oak, a few spring-fed streams, and oil wells. Our part of the county is a boom and bust type of place, with frantic drilling and prospecting during high oil prices and in the aftermath a few people operate these "stripper wells" for income. If properly taken care of, they can produce a good living for their owners and my grandfather worked in these oil fields, usually getting "free" rent on a shack of some sort and keeping the cash for his entertainment purposes. This left Grandma to tend to her small cow herd, chickens, and six wild kids.

Grandma made enough cash by selling milk and eggs to buy a few things but other than that, like most families during the depression, made almost everything they needed from flour sacks or hand me downs. I guess one year it got so bad that they went to "town" to apply for assistance. She was criticized by the caseworker because she and the family were so clean, they couldn't be needy. Grandma took her kids and got out of there, saying: "We may be poor but that don't mean we have to be dirty! How dare she judge us for trying to stay clean!" That bothered her for years, how appearance ruled who got help and who didn't.

I have a photo of Grandma so that I can remember that no matter how bad I think life gets, she had it worse. Fixing fence, digging out ponds, chasing kids through the house, the endless cleaning of their clothes, making the kid's own underwear out of flour sacks, and being isolated from the world most of the time. No doubt she enjoyed

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