the very beginnings.

I have not liked this week. I wasn't ready, in my head, for what awaited me. More early mornings than I am used to, less sleep, and less time to do the things I am accustomed to doing during those previous weeks of my life when I had more sleep and more time. 

Had I not been ushered into it by such a life giving weekend, I may have fared even worse...like a blind chicken being thrown into a pack of starving dogs. I don't really know where that came from. 

I have been coveting this time I find myself in since Monday. My work schedule informed me that I did not have to be at work until ten (instead of the normal six am), and I knew I would need these extra morning hours, by myself, to process the brunt of my week...I knew I would drive in my car to get to a table at my new favorite coffee spot in Tulsa, where the sun is currently shining on me through the ten feet tall paneless windows and a cup of Costa Rican coffee sits at my right, reminding me of the occasional bouts of warming comfort it will continue to afford me, in between types and pauses in thought. 

And so now, I will tell you a story, the source of the comfort and thankfulness that brought me into Monday. I tell it because one, she is worth writing about, and two, it's a really beautiful story, and each time I tell it, with excitement and sincerity, no one seems to quite grasp whatever it is that I am trying to get out. And so since I think that usually, I express myself better through written word, maybe I can get out what I have been failing to speak...

I think, too, that this will be an ongoing story. To sit and write it all would take many hours in a row. And so my blog will get the bits and pieces, the rough draft paragraphs, that will eventually become a whole. 

Beaulah Edith Harrell, my great-grandmother. 

We cannot control what we are born into. I think often about how what we are born into changes us, and how much different we would be had our situation been different. The circumstances of her childhood helped craft her into a fighter, though I suspect she had some natural fight in her from birth, before we are thrown into the world where we must consciously take care of ourselves. 

Her life began before our state was a state, when it was still Indian Territory. She was orphaned as a little girl, and raised on a farm in the country by "various stepsisters"...

The amazing thing here: What gives people the courage to step out of their circumstances, the life that they were born into, and make a new life for themselves in a foreign place all alone with nothing really going for them?

She moved to Tulsa as a teen, alone, and found a job as a nanny. Through this family, she met Augustus Clarence, a man whom I never met but genuinely owe everything to. This man, my great-grandfather, somehow - captured the heart of this young woman. I suspect he was attracted to her self-sufficiency, and also, obviously, her beauty. And it is this self-sufficiency, this spunk, this strength, that kept her full of life for over a hundred years, that enabled her to raise a healthy and beautiful family with nothing material, and that compels me, her great-granddaughter, someone that never knew her in her prime, to sit down and try, try, try to capture just a portion of the essence of her story.