Time Travelling

Here is another piece for our writing group...

Time Travelling to 1935.

I have taken myself back to 1935, to Iron Mountain in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where my father’s parents live on a small farm at Pine Creek. It is summertime, which is the best time to travel in the northern regions, a warm and fruitful time.  1935 tells me the Great Depression is upon us but it is not raging in the farming communities in this place. I want to meet and visit with my grandmother, whom I never met. I am told I am very much like her. I have a picture in my house of the family, taken probably about 1925  or so. My dad, born in 1919, is about 6 in the photo.  The youngest child, my uncle Walter, is a baby, no more than a year old, as he would be in 1925.  Grandma is a solid, sober looking woman, 45 years old, mother of 8 living children, all born within the span of 12 years. My dad looks like her, I look like my dad, so the physical evidence is there.  She immigrated from Swedish speaking Finland in 1908. She arrived with a Russian passport, thanks to geopolitical realities, but has always been identified as Swedish, so that is what we say now.

Before 1933, the family lived in town. Grandpa was a shoemaker and had a shop that the US government took to build a post office in Iron Mountain. Grandma had grown up on a farm, the child of crofters on a large place, and she wanted to go back to farming. The other side of the coin is that she insisted that the family move out of town to remove Grandpa from the earthly temptations of drinking and womanizing, but there is no proof of the second sin. They were married 11/11/11, and Grandma is quoted as saying, while 11/11 might be remembered as Armistice Day, for her that was when the war began. Though not prosperous, they lived a self-sufficient rural life on the farm until Grandma died in 1945.

We are in Grandma’s kitchen. It is mid morning. Everyday is baking day, she says, as bread is rising and pies are in the oven. I help by chopping dried apples for coffee cake. It is hot work in July, as the stove needs wood and the kitchen heats up. Kids are doing chores, off with mates, or making plans to attend dances in town. She has already tended the garden and ripe tomatoes and cukes sit in a basket, ready to round out the lunch of sandwiches, pickled beets, and milk. Coffee is on the stove and a fresh pot will be brewed when her neighbor ladies come for “fika”, the afternoon coffee break with cake and smokes in the kitchen. Grandma tells me that they will make plans for their annual weaving days. She will go to her sister Lisa’s house, taking with her the worn clothes and rags collected in the past year, and they will have a little vacation, weaving rag rugs. She says the kids get a kick out of trying to identify their old clothes in the rugs that are scattered through the house. The house is old but has indoor plumbing, a toilet in a closet and a tub. There is a furnace with one vent upstairs in the hallway between the bedrooms. There, the kids leap out of bed and dress over the vent in winter. Grandma tells me that she is glad she moved to America. In Finland, life was hard, work was endless and there was little expectation of better. She only went to 4 years of school and her father and six siblings all moved to America. Only her mother stayed there. Grandma said her father left Finland for America in 1884, when she was just 4, and they never heard from him again.  She tries to explain some of the relations but they are pieces of a complex and incomplete puzzle to me. They all have the same name but it is more of a place name than a family name. She shares some family stories.. both sides, grandpa’s and hers, have their share of members arrested for drunkenness or breaking the Sabbath, births out of wedlock, even thievery, but also the stories of immigration and starting a life in a new place.  Interesting to me but Grandma has apparently moved on from her past.. there is no time for sentimentality with a large family on a farm during the depression. So the stories are brief, the sun is warm, lunch is ready,  and her friends will arrive for coffee. Corn from the fields has been picked for supper.  There is a lull as lunchtime approaches. I must go. She will die in 1945 and I will be born in 1948, so we never meet. I like to think that I have her country soul, transferred to me via some kind of genetic/cosmic magic. I do have her face, her solid body, and a firstborn child at age 32. I am hoping I have more than the 65 years she was allotted.