A long time ago, in the black and white world of
the Fifties, in a little town in the northwest corner of Minnesota, I lived
among my cousins. My parents both came
from large families so I had very many cousins. In the constellated snapshot of that time, it is Sunday
afternoon, the aunts are beautiful in their Fifties hairstyles produced by
rubber curlers and bobby pins, their cotton dresses pressed against their legs by
the prairie breeze; the uncles in fedoras and white shirts with the sleeves
rolled up; a baby or two propped on the hood of a car or on a daddy’s
shoulders, and a small tribe of children in front. Everything was ahead of us then.
Our
grandparents’ farm was the gathering place for my mother’s side of the family
and we cousins played there often. We swung from
the thick hemp ropes in the hayloft or high into the leafy green sky on the
board swing tied to a cottonwood tree.
We ran wild in the fields, prowled the dusty attic with its discarded wonders,
or lounged in the canvas hammock slung between two box elders. We drank apricot nectar and ate bowls
of glorified rice and many slices of dense, sugary apple pie, made with only
three apples by our parsimonious grandmother. Without
cousins, the farm was boring and lonely; with cousins, it became a playground,
a place to explore.
But
eventually we were pulled apart. The world called us away and we saw each other less and
less. Now many years have passed,
our grown-ups are mostly gone, and we are the grandparents.
We
meet every now and then – a reunion, a funeral, a milestone birthday. At my mother’s 80th
birthday, after the old folks settled in for the night, a group of us went down
to the local bar and over whisky and beer, started talking. Tongues were loosened and things
revealed that made us all have a new appreciation for each other. Who knew that about Uncle Woody or Aunt
Pearl or, oh my goodness, Uncle Johnny did what? He did? She didn’t! That was so much fun, we’ve
wanted to do it again, but because we’re so far apart geographically, it just
hasn’t happened.
Until this summer. I
live in San Francisco, and when I heard my cousin Terry, who lives in Boston, was going to visit our cousin Nancy
in Portland for a week, I butted in, and am so glad I did. I came back from that weekend all aglow, happy to have been in their company, to have had two whole
days of talking and processing, bliss for women.
“I
love my cousins,” I said to my husband that evening over dinner. I tried to put my finger on what it was
that made it so pleasurable, besides the obvious. It was not only that I thoroughly enjoyed my time with them
and that we have so much in common, it was something more. They were people I was getting to
know, but who already shared my background, who knew, without my telling them, about
my Norwegian grandmother, her house on the prairie, her funny apple pies, the
beat-up stool in the kitchen, the dresser in the bedroom with its pot of rouge
and her hair combs. Who knew her
as I did.
“Cousinage,” my husband said.
“Huh?”
I said.
“Cousinage,
the kinship of cousins.”
I’d
never heard the word before and loved it immediately. Cousinage. Kinship. Yes.
It
would be fun to live among my cousins again. We could have big parties and sit around and talk
about the old days. We could discuss
our aunts and uncles and grandparents and our genealogy and where we came from,
and the things we know now that we didn’t know then. A cousin-friend is
different from siblings because you haven’t lived together, but you still have
the same blood, the same memories in many cases, and it’s always pleasantly surprising
when they elaborate on one of your memories. They know the little town you grew up in and where you lived,
your dad and mom, and even some of your secrets. Because cousins often have stories that you’ve never
heard, the telling of them over a bottle of wine, is as fun an evening as you
could ask for.
The
three of us did just that. Nancy brought
out boxes of old pictures we pored over. “Is that me?”
We read from her mother’s diary,
our aunt Ann, of her trip to Norway in the Seventies, and looked at the fading
pictures she took of Gramma’s home on the Sognfjord, of Lars and Nils, her
brothers. I gave them each a CD of
an interview with Gramma my sister did that’d I’d transferred from tape and
transcribed on paper. Some
of Gramma’s story is there, but we regret that we didn’t pay more attention.
Terry,
who married a Jew, told us that after her first child was born, Gramma asked my
brother, who lived near her, to sneak in and kidnap the baby and have it
baptized. “She didn’t!” Nancy and
I exclaim. Terry nods and
smiles. “She did.” And then quickly adds, “He didn’t, of
course.”
We
ponder why Gramma married Grampa, a Swede!, only six months after arriving in this
country. I tell them what Uncle
Arnold told me: Ingeborg’s father told
her he’d rather see her dead than married to a Swede. I sit back and look at them. Did they know that? Actually, they did.
Well,
Terry says, did we know that Gramma had a boyfriend who she promised to wait
for but didn’t? Who followed her
to this country but never found her?
Who’s letters were intercepted by her sister Kristina? Who Gramma asked her daughters to find
after Grandpa died? Oh lord, this
gets us going. This is more grist
for our hungry mills. But now we’re
even more confused as to why she married Grandpa so soon after arriving.
Nancy’s
mother was Gramma’s first-born and arrived a month early, premature we’ve
always been told, but we wonder: did
Gramma get knocked up? We fall
back on the sofa in hard laughter as we try to imagine our stern Lutheran
grandmother in the throes of passion. We agree Otto and Ingeborg did not have a happy
marriage and Terry suggests that it was probably a marriage of
convenience. We sip our drinks and
stare at the floor.
“Did Gramma only make roast beef?” Terry
muses. “We’re always eating chuck
roast in my memories.”
“Did
she have any hobbies, any activities outside of housework and Ladies Aid?”
Nancy wonders. We can’t think of
any. She didn’t sew, embroider or
crochet. I don’t remember her
making lefse or krumkake, or any Norwegian specialty except for rømmegrøt,
we all remember that. Takk skatta ha, linkety blee, forty in and
you can’t catch me. I recite
this childhood rhyme mimicking the Norwegian we heard around the house and they
recognize it at once. We commiserate
with how frustrating it was not being able to understand her and of Gramma’s
frustration when we incorrectly pretended we did.
Nancy
drove us around Portland, showed us the sights, the bridges, the Saturday
market, the Chinese Garden, Powell’s bookstore, lunch at a Swedish restaurant,
and on Sunday, a stroll along the beautiful Willamette River in the cool of the
morning. We picked blackberries
and recalled how we had to pick berries when we were kids, of eating chokecherries
at Lake Bronson, of canning and putting up preserves. There seems to be no end to the stories
we can tell.
I could still see my old playmates in
these women: Nancy at seven, yodeling
on a country road after we’d seen the movie Heidi
at the drive-in, and Terry with her mosquito-bitten tanned little legs, running
after her little brothers on the farm. We asked someone to take our picture, and as a
thank-you to Nancy, I juxtaposed that picture with one taken of us on the farm
when we were around ten, in our short shorts and skinny legs. It’s perfect with the river behind
us, wide and deep and flowing out to sea.