But consider where Cleo Potter's tale began, in the hand-to-mouth existence of a poor family in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico during the Dust Bowl years.
Contrast that to where Cleo (Tyler) Potter ended up spending nearly half of her 87 years - in a home of her own, alongside the Alberton Gorge, on the Clark Fork River in western Montana.
But they had electricity and indoor plumbing, which wasn't usually the case in earlier years, and they had a drop-dread gorgeous stretch of river at their doorstep, backed by a mountain that climbed to heaven.
"My mother had a great deal of gratitude for what she had. She wasn't always wanting more," said Gianna James of Missoula, the youngest of Jim and Cleo's offspring.
Even in the final years of Cleo's life, which ended Jan. 7 at an extended-care home in Missoula, she showed no signs of bitterness for some of the bum cards life had dealt.
"She was always happy, always had a smile on her face," said her oldest child, Jim Jr., of Arlee. "When it got to the point that she couldn't get out as much as she liked to, she was still happy with it."
Cleo Potter was born in Hanna, Okla., in 1920. Poverty was a fact of life.
Imagine yourself a teenager, picking cotton in a hot and dusty Texas field. The more you reaped, the better chance your family had of not going hungry.
"She told me stories about how big and heavy those bags were, how these cotton bolls have sharp points on them so when you're picking the cotton it pricks your fingers. And of course, back then you didn't always have gloves," said Gianna. "They didn't give them to the pickers."
Cleo and Jim married after the Great Depression had ended, but it was still no walk in the park.
Jim's military service and then ranch jobs took the family to Florida, to Texas, and to Colorado, before they landed in Montana in the early 1950s. The Potters worked on various ranches in eastern Montana before Jim found a spread near Arlee in the fall of 1959.
When Cleo passed away, her son Don Potter jotted down some memories of Cleo during those migrant days growing up.
His mother, wrote Don, had a multipurpose broom, good for shooing rattlesnakes away from the front door along the Arkansas River in Colorado and swatting and shooing away a pair of fighting bulls over the front yard fence in Richland County.
"Of course, she did have a pitchfork standing near as a backup," wrote Don, who lives in Bonner. "Her broom saved me from mean geese, angry flocks of chickens, large menacing dogs, belligerent buck sheep, and one cantankerous billy goat.
"Broom bristles in the face seem to be more than many animals can stand up to. I believe that broom also boosted me along toward proper behavior a time or two."
"She loved kids," said Jim Jr. "I guess that's why she had all of us. Her mother taught school, and she would have made an excellent teacher, but with that many kids and being a housewife, there wasn't a lot of time left over. That was her primary job, if you will, and her devotion to the kids was something else."
On the surface, that devotion wasn't so noticeable, he added.
"But let something happen, or somebody get in the way of her kids and the hackles would come up and to the defense she'd come."
Things didn't go well on the ranch at Arlee, which required a large financial commitment. The livestock became diseased, and almost all the Potters' cattle and many of the horses had to be destroyed.
Jim Sr. found a smaller place at Cyr, west of Alberton. In July 1963, after Jim Jr. had left home for the Air Force and six months after Gianna was born, they moved to their home on the Gorge.
To Gianna, it was a slice of riverside paradise.
"It was beautiful. I grew up having the river, the land and the animals," she said.
She could ride her horse along the Potters' spread that grew from seven acres to nearly 23. They had all kinds of animals - cattle, peacocks, chickens, ducks, goats and pigs, not to mention the elk, bear and other wild critters that used a river ford downstream from the property.
For Cleo, it was the first home she and Jim owned free and clear.
The river was a special magnet to one of her boys. Jerry Potter spent his happiest days on the water, shooting rapids with his high school buddies before going in with a couple of them to start the first commercial rafting company on the Alberton Gorge.
Below the family property is a rapid the Western White Water rafting gang referred to as "Potter's Plunge" in honor of Jerry.
When Jerry was killed in an interstate collision near St. Regis in 1980, his parents established a family cemetery on the Cyr property. Jim Sr. was buried there in 1986, and Jerry's older sister, Nyla, was interred last August after succumbing to a long bout of cancer.
In 1999, when the time came for Cleo to move closer to medical services, she and the family faced a dilemma. She would need money to live in an apartment in Missoula, money that could only be secured by selling the property.
But Cleo and Jim Sr. had always viewed the land as a place for their kids and grandkids to come home to.
"It was a really difficult decision" to sell, said Gianna, the only one of the children to establish a home of her own on the property. "Mom and I discussed it a lot, what Dad would have wanted, what Jerry would have wanted. They were both lovers of the outdoors, hunters, lovers of wide-open spaces and all animals. They were both very much mountain men.
"We talked about not wanting to see trophy homes built on our little piece of paradise on the river."
Cleo's decision: remove the houses and sell all but the family cemetery plot. An anonymous buyer held it in reserve until Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks could secure the funding to purchase it.
Now the state agency manages the property as undeveloped open space, and generations of Montanans will benefit from Cleo's choice.
"It's not uncommon," Gianna pointed out, "that once you've experience absolute hardship and poverty, some people seem to never cease wanting to acquire more. My mother was never like that."
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