For a gifted storyteller with the ability to pluck the extraordinary from the ordinary, the occasion of Carol Ryrie Brink’s birth would give her the opportunity to introduce herself into a particular place and time. Her life tentatively began on 28 December 1895. She grew up hearing the story of that winter evening from her grandmother until it became her own. Her grandfather, Dr. William W. Watkins, arrived at the Ryries\u27 house on a sleigh pulled through the snow by his high-stepping horse. As the doctor pumped the baby’s small arms up and down and blew his tobacco-scented breath into the cold, still body, an anxious father and exhausted mother waited to hear the thin cry. As Brink tells in her reminiscences, “I gave a sharp cry and began what has been a marvelous and rewarding journey, a thing too precious to be minimized, my lovely life” (Chain of Hands 6)
