Readings and Greetings: One Hundred Years of Marriage

NOTE TO THE READER
What was your father thinking the night he proposed to your mother? Why did she say yes? 

By the time we ask, all of the compelling details have cooled into whatever myths they've chosen to tell us.  Our grandparents' stories are even more frozen, and the truths of our great-grandparents' unions have perished in the airless memories of the dead.


After reading this note in One Hundred Years of Marriage, I stopped reading the book that evening and pondered all of these questions about my own family. These are the questions that intrigue genealogy storytellers.  

Louise Farmer Smith, who grew up in Norman, Oklahoma explores these questions through the lives of four generations of 'long suffering women' whose marriages produce children, depression, resilience, secrets, betrayal, and memories.  The story is balanced with insights to each couple. No marriage is one-sided, nor is this story. 

Nineteen year old Patty, becomes the caretaker of her mother, Alice, when her mother descends into the darkness of the 'change.' In order to help her little brother better understand what is happening to his mother she walks him through the wooded area out back, with the intention of explaining why their mother

married their father. The story winds back to the weekend her mother drove with her fiance, Cecil Brady, to meet his family in McAlister. Through this retelling Patty begins to understand her mother's darkness, but it is only a fragment of her parent's marriage. 

Story by story the reader discovers the path that each woman chose and why. How did Patty's great-grandmother, a beautiful young woman, become an orphan and fall into such want and desolation. The men, too, have their stories. Young Danny Hale's heart is broken when his mother, once a strong educated woman falls into depression, leaving his father no choice but to take her to the Lincoln Asylum. The Civil War, a generation of families who moved west from Virginia to Nebraska and Oklahoma Territory, to the return of veterans from World War II, are pieces of history that fill this story with love, heartache, angry men, and children who learn to stand on their own.

These are the generations who kept secrets, who kept skeletons in the closet. Louise Farmer Smith imagines what these secrets might have been, and creates one hundred years of family stories that keep the reader inthralled. 

Postcards From the Road

What fun to travel the highways across our nation.  Since retirement, the wheels of Jack's pickup have driven through many states on interstate highways and the lesser more colorful roads of America. I'm happy to drive most anywhere, but my old crooked back prefers to fly.

No argument here, we were hungry and found the perfect place.

A place to sleep in Santa Fe brought a warm sunrise and color all around. 







Jack often reminds me, "We can't stop everywhere." 
"But I may not come this way again," I meekly argue.  We may miss a few museums and noted sites, but we store plenty of memories with stops like these.










If you are driving too fast on I-10 in Arizona, you will miss Texas Canyon.  It is a natural hiccup of nature that created

these massive boulders. Rather than a full volcanic eruption it merely bubbled, causing the Little Dragoon Mountains to fold and fault.

We passed right through it before I could get a camera shot, so on the return trip we made a point of stopping, walking, touching, and remembering this unique site. 


 I only wish we had packed a sack lunch. 

Perhaps the hand of God? 

Or is this Hans Solo in the Empire Strikes Back?

When the magma cooled it crystallized into quartz monzonite.  Because it cools slowly monzonite like granite forms much larger quartz crystals that are easy to see. I imagined I was touching the belly of earth when I rubbed my fingers along these stones. 

Nature's balancing act. 

Like Mother Nature, our lives are a balancing act.  It's always refreshing to travel, to visit new places, to meet up with friends, and discover quaint beauties created by God or by the hand of man, but home is where the barking dancing dog greets us with unconditional love.  And family breathes a sigh of relief.