Mom was a dreamer, a hopeless romantic, a singer-songwrter, a storyteller, a woman of exquisite beauty, compassion and down home values. She was thrifty and had the resourceful spirit of a gypsy, an entrepreneur and an inventer.
She was born in 1939 in a workers camp in Houston, Texas during The Great Depression. Her parents were both from the Ozarks. They met at church, and while Ava was pregnant with my mother, the two of them hitchhiked together to Houston looking for work. Mom had no early memories of her father. He tried to kidnap her, and her mother kidnapped her back. Mom was 18 years old when she met him again in a train station. Growing up the only child to a single mother, a holy roller, hitchhiking from revival meeting to revival meeting, and town to town looking for work peeling potatoes, plucking chickens, milking cows, even midwifing.
Mom had an unconventional upbringing. Naturally, my brother and I followed suit and were also raised unconventionally.
Mom was a dreamer, but not the idle kind. She dreamed with action. She dreamed with grit. She dreamed with a gypsy soul and a heart full of songs.
She was a romantic in every sense, a believer in possibility, in love, and in second chances, and sometimes third chances. She wore her beauty effortlessly, not just the kind you could see, but the kind you could feel. The kind rooted in compassion, kindness, and possessed earthy wisdom and resourcefulness that comes from living a full and sometimes difficult life. To know her was to witness a life lived on her own terms.
She wasn’t June Cleaver, the perfect TV mom—far from it. She was something more interesting. She raised two kids on her own, fiercely and creatively, giving us a life filled with stories, detours, lessons, and love. My brother once said, “We don’t take vacations—we move.” And that’s true. We saw the country not through postcards, but through the rearview mirror. Los Angeles, South Pasadena, Bisbee, Atlanta, Truth or Consequences, Las Vegas—each a chapter in her lifelong search for a better way, a better life.
She worked harder than most people will ever know. At age 17, after graduating secretarial school, she lied about her age and said she was 18 and that’s how she got her job at Luke Air Force Base, where she stood shoulder to shoulder with top gun fighter pilots, including the legendary Tuskegee Airmen. In courtrooms, she worked alongside judges as a legal secretary and paralegal. In bars and honky-tonks, she sang her heart out. In her private time, she took singing lessons, wrote songs, and plotted systems to beat the odds in Vegas . She believed in making it big, whether by winning at blackjack, finally getting the child support she deserved, or writing a hit song in Nashville.
None of those dreams panned out. But she never stopped dreaming.
And through all the near-misses and winding roads, she held fast to one core desire: to own a home of her own. A home. Not just a roof over her head, but a base of stability for herself and her children. And as only she could, she didn’t stop at just owning a home; she became a landlord.
With tenacity, thrift, and an eye for opportunity, she purchased her first property in Tucson, Arizona. In 1991, she moved to Tulsa to be closer to my brother, who was attending Bible College. A $10 deposit was all it took for her to land a duplex in desperate need of some tender loving care. She rolled up her sleeves and got to it. She painted, fixed, and upgraded, becoming a regular figure at her local Home Depot. She bought more homes on or near Victor Avenue, and from there bloomed a wild and wonderful chapter full of hard work, tenants, mishaps, triumphs, and plenty of stories.
She thought like an entrepreneur, always thinking about ways she could pad her income. She was a bit of an inventor, too. If she didn’t have a hammer, she’d use the heavy heel of a shoe. If she didn’t have a screwdriver, she’d use a dull knife. I recall her using cardboard boxes filled with books to create a partition in a bedroom we shared. My mother may not have fit the mold, but she had the ingenuity of an inventor.
Mom taught us the value of hard work and that success isn’t always about wealth or fame. Sometimes, it’s about resilience. About reinvention. About believing that the next chapter could still hold something amazing.
She never gave up. But sometimes she realized it’s easier to let go and cut your losses. Still, she continued turning stones until she found what she was looking for.
And in the end, she did.
Rest well, Mom. You were the dreamer who made dreams feel possible. You were the storm and the calm. The song and the silence. The story and the storyteller.
Mom, we’ll miss you. You are now home.
