Oklahoma Dust

Stepmother came into my life when I was ten years old, like no woman I had ever seen before. When my parents had divorced, it was a very sad time for everyone, but when my father returned from Brazil with a woman in tow, sheer evil came to town.

She wore long pearls and gaudy diamond earrings and tight blouses, and spoke little English, and men stared at her in a way I didn't understand. When I asked my father where he had met her, he would laugh and say, "It wasn't exactly at church." She was a woman on a mission, and that mission was to become the jewel-bedecked mistress of a beautiful, sprawling, affluent ranch, in command of a household of servants, and years later, she confided, in a sorrowful moment of review of her life, that when instead of the sprawling ranch she had envisioned, she "had nearly died" to find instead the very real little farm with the little frame house in the middle of almost nowhere, on the lonely plains of Oklahoma, and instead of servants, the hardy, bent old Nora, my grandmother. But, it was better than nothing! At least it was better than what might have been, and she spent years, the remainder of her life, attempting to wrest it from my father. At the very last of his life-sick, afraid, and with dementia, she coerced him to sign away everything he had saved for his children.

She finally got what she wanted after so many years.

But not for long.