Colors from the Dust

By 33 Emily Jane had given birth to 13 children, and buried three. However, her life began on a much different trajectory; one of luxury and ease, the daughter of a mercantile owner. Her father opened his first general store selling basic drygoods the year before he married, and by the time Emily Jane was born he owned a chain of successful mercantiles selling everything from candies to coffins. By the time Emily Jane’s sister Lena was born their father was one of the wealthiest in 5 counties, which made the girls the target of fortune hunters and scoundrels. Lena, sadly, was born weak eyed, and married the first suitor who came courting when she was only 13, fearing her eyes that looked more at each other than at the world would limit her prospects. Lena’s husband was worthless and mean, and Emily Jane resolved that she would wait for a man with his own mind and ambition. In 1919 Joe Taylor rode into town, six shooter on his hip and a chip on his shoulder. He was mostly of Scottish descent, but the cheekbones that cut high across his square face and his hair black as pitch whispered of his Chickasaw great-grandmother. The day he entered Emiily Jane’s father’s store was the day she lost her heart. Ten years her senior they wed when she was only 16, and her father worried that the young man with the black eyes and soft voice would take his daughter out of his life forever. That fear lead Emily Jane’s father to offer Joe Taylor a partnership in the family business, but Joe Taylor had the mind and ambition Emily Jane had wanted, and he wanted no part of being handed anything. He’d heard there was still land out west in what was now known as Oklahoma, and his Chickasaw ancestry called him home. So, he and Emily Jane loaded a wagon and headed away from the life she’d known and the last of her comfort.

What began as a dream tuned onto a nightmare as the depression and then the dustbowl hit the Oklahoma plains. One baby followed another, and the family scratched a living from the dry red dust. But Emily Jane stayed Emily Jane; her motto became “we may have to be poor but we don’t have to be dirty”, and her small home full of children was always clean, her front garden full of bright spots of color with zinnias and gladiolas, and her children always tidy. Even at the height of the depression her family never went hungry thanks to the vegetable garden she tended like a hawk, and the hens she raised. Every flour sack that came into her home was saved. Each was put to use: some as bright curtains for the rough hewn window openings, some as dresses for her daughters, shirts for her sons, and the scraps turned into bright quilts for the beds packed into the one room home on the dry plot of land that she and Joe Taylor called their own.

It wasn’t the life she’d been born to, and it wasn’t the life she’d dreamed of, but she made the most beautiful life it could be, spots of bright color pulled out of the dust.