I stared in astonishment at the photograph my elderly aunt had recently produced for me from her collection of family photos. The 18-year old woman gazing back at me projected confidence and strength, and bore an uncanny physical resemblance in some of her features to me.
The photograph itself, taken in 1912, is 107 years old and bears all the tell-tale scars of its age. I had never seen it before. At the time this photograph was taken, the young woman was attending college at the Alabama Girls Technical Institute (later, the University of Montevallo), in 1912, mind you. She was my paternal grandmother, Rosalie Heaton.
From the History section on the University of Montevallo website, I learned that the Alabama Girls Technical Institute (originally founded as the Alabama Girls Industrial School) opened its doors in October 1896 to 150 young women to participate in a great experiment, in an innovative education in Alabama.
“At last,” it read, “a school in Alabama whose purpose was to educate women to be self-supporting, an opportunity for young women to expand their minds and dreams in a state poverty-stricken by economic circumstances, that could provide little public education for its citizens.”
My grandmother, Rosalie Heaton, had certainly been a pioneer in her day. This revelation, unearthed and unveiled by a single photograph hidden in obscurity for numerous decades shifted my perspective in an instant. The only image I had held of her previously had been one from a much later period in her life.
Eventually, she would marry my grandfather, Earnest Clifton Cross, move to a farm in Georgiana, Alabama, give birth to and raise 7 children (4 daughters + 3 sons), live through the Great Depression, send all 3 sons into World War II, and be tragically widowed at age 46. She would need that pioneering spirit to persevere.
All I had ever really known of Rosalie Heaton Cross was that on that fateful day in 1959 when my father had shown up on her doorstep at the little house on Mandrell Street with an infant and a three-year old daughter in tow, both freshly bereft of their mother, she had said yes. She was 65 years old at the time. That had always been enough for me.
In my way of reckoning, her willingness to take my sister and me in for an unknown and undetermined amount of time had been the merciful hand of God making provision for us in the midst of a terribly calamitous situation.
A shift in perspective is a rather subtle thing; it’s a whisper, not a shout. It doesn’t change the circumstance in the least, it simply changes the way we view the circumstance, the way we make sense of things.
And the best part? We get to choose our perspective of any given situation on any given day. We should choose wisely then because the way we feel and then act about anything (or everything) will invariably follow the way we think about it.