My grandparents on my father's side (both of whom were dead before I was born) and two of my aunts. The strange looking little girl who looks more like a ghost is a mystery. No one remembers her. My grandmother died having my father. My grandfather was an itinerant preacher, a cook, a carny, and all-around hellraiser.  

The Wichita Mountains, the second oldest mountains in the western hemisphere, holy place to the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache Indians, and home to the largest herd of buffalo in North America. Geronimo is buried only a few miles away at Fort Sill. The wonderful writer, N. Scott Momaday, wrote of the Wichitas in The Way To Rainy Mountain. The hawk in the picture could have ridden the wind to any of the places I grew up in a matter of minutes.  

My amazing half-Cherokee, half English royalty descended mother, with dogs. This place was where a road dead-ended. We considered ourselves lucky to have electricity, but there was no telephone lines, no running water (until we dug a well), no indoor plumbing, and the house was a shack so run-down most people probably thought only ghosts occupied it.Big Beaver Creek was only a mile away and it used to rage with a big rain, sometimes washing away our wheat or cotton crops that we depended on for our meagre living.