The continued thought

I have always view life as a series of pitfalls and tragedies with intervening events that bring some relaxation to the soul until the next downfall.  All of these are tests.  Do you fall prey and become depress or bitter or do you rise above it  and carry forth? 
 
In the first seven years of my father's life, his mother, a woman of only 26 years had left home at 16 penniless, fallen in love and married only to lose her husband to illness, forcing her to return to her parents' home.  She was without options and unable to care for her child.  Her father took her and my father in and she lived in the poor coal country in Eastern Kentucky.  Yet just a few short years later, a handgun tore their lives apart again, as my father's grandfather was murdered in the mines, bringing another change.
 
Again without the means to support her child and herself, my father's mother moved on, on to Ashland, Kentucky; there to finally find herself, setting up a small women's shop.  There she met her second husband and married.  But then, when life should be calming down and the childhood my father should be enjoying should all be occurring, the wanderlust in both parents kicks in and the family is uprooted and moves on, on to Kansas, the first on a series of many moves to come.