Full Circle: A Life Story

Mae Miller, suffering an aneurysm-induced coma, lies in a hospital bed.  Clarence, her husband of fifty-four years, is at her side.  For Mae, this is only one of many times she has had to battle death, beginning with the loss of her mother and infant brother to a tornado that tore their small tenant farmhouse apart.  The tornado ripped seven-year-old Mae's infant brother from her arms and ripped a hole in her heart.  Years later, drought devastates the family farm and drives a wedge between a teenage Mae and her dad.  Mae moves west to live with her grown sister. Clarence, a sharecropper's son, is driven to not be a hard, cruel man like his dad.  Again and again, life throws obstacles his way that test his resolve.  Clarence, faced with the choice of moving back to the hated family farm and his cruel father or finding work elsewhere, migrates west to work under the desert sun. Mae and Clarence meet in the cotton fields of Arizona in 1938 and marry soon after.  Together they raise a family while tackling life's obstacles head-on. Full Circle has all the pathos and sorrow of a John Steinbeck novel surrounded by the full fury of an Oklahoma tornado.  Out of the conflagration, the Miller family finds their way through more than fifty years of dust and dirt and an uncertain future.