View From a Prairie Home

by Hege Hernfindahl, Columnist

When I turn the page of the calendar and see December, I realize I have to do something to get ready for Christmas even though I would rather curl up with a book and another cup of coffee. But I should decorate the house at least. Looking around, I see that before I decorate, I have to clean.

Our kitchen is the dirtiest room in the house. We both love to cook which creates its own version of dirt, so I decide to give the kitchen a real spring cleaning. This hasn’t been done in years. Behind the kitchen door, which is always open, I have a bulletin board. It is covered in dust, I am ashamed to say. On it I have put pictures and letters over the years which now are in double or even triple layers. All have to be removed. Underneath all the top layers I find a poem and also a very old and worn love letter. It is undated and was written to me by my mother.

My mother demanded a lot from her surroundings, but above all from herself and her children. She had excelled academically and was employed, as very few women were in those days, in a government agency as an economist doing research about the economic conditions of families with children in Norway. Due to her excellent work she became a foremost expert in her field and frequently testified in parliament when legislation on working families was discussed.

It was not easy growing up always trying to please a mother who demanded the best of me. I was never athletic enough or industrious enough. I preferred roaming the woods with my friends to practicing handball, for instance. In high school, I almost failed physics and chemistry. I ended up studying philosophy at the University of Oslo. A subject that surely would not land me a prestigious job. And then I emigrated and moved to a farm in America. She seemingly never got over it.

But the letter was poetic. In it, she celebrated me for who I am. A lover of nature. A person who preferred solitary walks to crowds. Not a scientist like she was, but a reader of books and a writer of stories. And she had made two hearts around my name. In her love letter, she abdicated her role as a person who tried to push me to become like her. She celebrated me for who I am.

I also found a copy of another poem, which used to be on the bulletin board in her kitchen and is written by a famous Norwegian poet, Aasmund Olafsson Vinje. It is about grief. About how when we lose someone dear to us, they never really leave us. We hear them in the whistling wind, in the silence of the morning air, in the flutter of birds’ wings, in the call of a loon. And in our helpless tears when we wake to a morning without them.

My mother became a widow at age 52. My father had been the love of her life. Her soul mate. And I had left Norway and lived across the ocean seven time zones away. She had faced mortal danger for five years during the Nazi occupation of Norway. Later, she endured tuberculosis, heart attacks and cancer. And through it all, she forged ahead with determination and strength. All her focus was on perfection. But then she lost my father and I also think she thought she had lost me. And she mellowed.

Life is not easy. It isn’t meant to be easy. There are lows and then there are highs. God is with us all the way. And through it, we become stronger, but we also change.

Editor’s note: “Mor” is Mother in Norwegian.