A personal note…

My mother passed away yesterday. She was in her late nineties. She stood about five four, the granddaughter of western pioneers: she was born in an Oklahoma farmhouse just after statehood, and didn't have a birth certificate until it began to matter.  She grew up on an Oklahoma farm, rode to a one room schoolhouse on a horse, and was so tiny they had to put books under her feet so she could use a regular desk. Around the time of  the Oklahoma dustbowl, she was introduced to my father, who worked