Tears in the Red Dirt

Stay with me while I set the “premise” for this story. My granddad and his brother, each married ladies of another family who were sisters! That made all of my Mother’s cousin’s “Double Cousins”.

A couple of her uncles were involved in the Cherokee Strip Run. They did not make the actual run, but rather they were close to the finish line when it was over and they actually traded a shot gun for their first piece of “red dirt”, Oklahoma property!

Oklahoma was a rough, very poor place in those days…..land filled with sage brush, black jack trees, rocks and very little to work with, where they literally scratched out a living. After years of hard, back breaking work, They were both very successful ranchers, as their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren are today.

We visited my Mother’s cousin George and his wife Georgia, as often as possible and I always loved going because it was such a beautiful and wild place. If you’ve never been to Oklahoma, the dirt there is red, different and more special than any other place in the world . Getting dirty in Oklahoma is something that every kid should get to experience! Also, each time I went, I came home with a new “rose rock”. There is a lot to tell about my “rocks”, but I’ll save that for another time.

The 2nd cousins closest to my age were boys and it was such a treat for me to go and learn from them. They also had miles and miles of open land to rome, but they had horses to do it on! In my eyes that made them the luckiest people on earth.

When my Mother & Dad were married in 1935, they went on a honeymoon to Colorado and camped out in a tent. It was during that trip when they met “Henry”. As the story was told me, Henry was an old mountain man, a hermit who lived by himself in a old rickty cabin, deep in the great Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Henry only had one arm but he hunted and fished as well as any pro and never allowed his disability to hamper his expertise.

He and my parents became close friends, and they returned to visit him many times. He presented them with a hand tanned mountain lion pelt which is still in our family.

I remember the night the phone ring and we received word that George had gotten his arm tangled up in a piece of farm machinery and they had to amputate it. It was like the world stopped. This would have been in the mid to late 40’s I believe.

Sometime later after George was released from the hospital and returned home, we went to visit him. I only remember walking thru the house, which was very quiet and solemn, (unlike the other times we had went to visit). We were led to the “back porch” where they had set up a bed for George. I remember my Mom went over and hugged him, and he cried, and said “I don’t know what I’m going to do”. I stood there in the doorway and looked at this man who had always been so strong and active and vibrant, and I think that’s the first time I knew what it was to be sad for someone else. George’s stump was heavily bandaged and he was very weak. I remember I cried too. One look told me he was a broken man.

What I believe was months later, I heard my Mother tell my Dad that she had called and talked to Georgia that day. She told Mom George was healing good, but very depressed and they didn’t know how to get him back to work and involved in things around the ranch again, or what he might be able to do. At that time, my Dad suggested that they put him in touch with Henry. I don’t know how the arrangements were made, but I know Dad was involved in getting George to Henry’s cabin. George spent many weeks with Henry, learning how to use tools, fish and hunt, and work, and live life with one arm. There is so much more to George and Georgia’s life and their family and how it has intertwined with mine through the years, and does to this day. There have been many other tears fall in the red dirt through the years, but the love of God and His strength and the ties we have with each other have always rose to the top. Now another one of my 2nd cousins, George’s daughter is fighting her own battle and I have no doubt that strength has surfaced once again. I am still amazed at how one life in this world, many miles from someone else’s, can eventually touch another’s. How the folks we meet in our lives will at some point make an impression in the lives of someone else we know. Angels appear in the strangest places in the strangest of ways, and the red dirt will always be there but it’s traces are left around the world.