Here goes nothin’––I am just here to blog for blogging’s sake. I’m not writing today to rant or complain, I just want to write. As stated in an earlier blog, one reason for this blog site (such an unflattering word) is for posterity. I think my family will appreciate taking a look at my thoughts in the years after my demise; but I may be thinking a smidgen too highly of myself. (Not an unknown occurrence.)
This is my great-great grandmother, Eliza Davis Yoakam.
I’m thankful that we women of today don’t have to wear all those stuffy clothes. Although, I have never met her, I admire her strength, her faith, and her tenacity.
She was one of the first white female settlers in the Coos Bay, Oregon area.
As was common in that era, she lost her oldest son while trekking west.
Unfortunately, this was not the only child she lost. While burning a tree too large for her husband, John, to cut down, a freak windstorm felled the tree upon their makeshift cabin. She lost five daughters in one fell. They were overjoyed to find her two young sons, in the trundle bed, blissfully unaware of the tragic events. When asked many years later how she dealt with this unimaginable loss, this was her answer in striving to forget her grief:
“Many joys and satisfactions have come to me in the later years. But looking backward to the time John and I stood terror stricken by the bodies of our children whose lives we had been unable to save; there always comes to me the feeling we must go forward and never falter by the way. It is for the sake of our living ones. Never give up, even though all seems lost.”
theRagingSpoon 