Like most people I have many identifiers. Currently I call myself writer, author, minister of Word and sacrament in the ELCA, and child development specialist. I am also a mother, widow, wife, sister, and daughter. My pronouns are she/hers.
My eldest son likes to cuss, curse, and swear. Profanity prevails in his speech pattern. Fulmination flairs when he does. He’s eighteen, a creative, an explorer, a curious learner, and a wonderful guy who just happens to love words which send my husband into shock while sounding like fingernails clawing the chalkboard to me.
But my son adores this language. He revels in its explosive sounds using it as often as possible and in as many expressive ways as he can think of. His verbal discharges go off at every turn no matter the time of day, night, or situation. As a mother I am at times offended, astounded, embarrassed, or (and this is the worst one) beset by feelings of maternal failure.
When my son was younger he created his own curse words—words I could not deny the use of because “technically” they were not bad or banned. My son used these suspicious words daily as he marched toward the open doors of adolescence. One word, bodo, was an often used utterance I merely grew tired of hearing at the time. I assumed rightly that this word phase would soon pass. My mistake was misunderstanding where bodo was leading.
Ouchy Iowa Prairie Plant
It occurs to me however (only in my calmer moments after breathing measured counts both in and out for ten minutes)that my current maternal state of angst and need for a “curse free” vacation clouds the true issue…just a bit.
Still More Midwestern Prairie Biters
Cursing is not new in the grand history of humanity. It’s certainly not new during the tumultuous transition time we all face between childhood and adulthood. And let’s face it: Such emotionally infused word choices may be as old as the prairie out here in Iowa. I’m sure the native peoples in these whereabouts had a few choice words for the many, many variations of biting thorns growing in and among the grasses.
I suspect also that people have been making up cursing words and phrases in every world language, dialect, and regionalism for centuries. After all, sound and word play are fun and seem to discharge a bit of our built up emotions. Avoiding maternal irritation may be an added benefit to creating new sound combinations.
So could it be that cursing is good for us?
YES!
My son would say “yes”. And who am I to judge? Our shared heritage basks in a number of utterances which seem to cross the line into the cursing genre. These utterances in their heyday,when people still spoke the old country languages, were acceptable and common within the culture…
even with mothers.
Check back soon for Common Cursing: Part II which boasts actual video footage of my Minnesota relatives (can you believe it?) possibly…(this is hard for me to admit)…using language that may be considered…cursing. Until then, Huffff…da!
One day (less than twenty-four hours really) before I met the man who would be my husband, Great Aunt Mabel hosted her last picnic…
On the farm.
Now Mabel Ohman Johnson was my dad’s aunt by marriage. She began her life on Swan Johnson’s farm as a hired girl and ended it as a wife, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother in what can only be called an age-old tale. She fell in love with farm’s youngest son, Theodore Swan Johnson. They were married on February 19, 1927.
But to begin with, Mabel didn’t just go on the tramp looking for service work knocking on farm doors up and down what is now County Highway 50 when the time came for her to make her own way. No. Mabel and her future husband were part of a interconnected community spanning two countries. No one descended from this ancestral web can fully figure out the intricacies of its ties now. However, Ted and Mabel were clan (släkt in Swedish)–their DNA shared if one cared to look back far enough to the small parishes in Sweden from which they were descended.
Road map to Deer Creek, Minnesota
A new släkt had grown up around the farm in Compton Township, Otter Tail County, Minnesota. While employment took some of its members to nearby towns, Compton, with its church and school and family farms, was the hub. In the case of Mabel’s folks, they lived up the road four miles from the family enclave in the small hamlet of Deer Creek, Minnesota. Her dad, Alfred Ohman, I believe worked for the railroad.
Which brings me to the slight uneasiness of clan for us nowadays. My father said that growing up he “was related to everyone in the neighborhood.” But what he didn’t say was how many times he was related to his neighbors. In the case of Great Aunt Mabel, her father Alfred was my paternal grandfather’s older brother which made my father and Mabel first cousins as well as nephew and aunt (Ted being my dad’s mother’s brother).
But back to the picnic. In late summer of 1994, Great Aunt Mabel, now in the twilight of her years, decided the throw her last picnic on the farm (or so she said) at the end of September, the last Sunday in September to be exact. We were all invited via the old fashioned way of word of mouth, or at least I was.
By this time, Ted had died and so had his brother and farming partner “Ock”. Section twenty of Compton Township, once full of extended family and friends, was sparse now with maybe one or two exceptions. Gone were the eighty acre farms, each with its own pack of kids and a hired man or two or a recently immigrated relative learning to stand up in a new country. Gone was the church around the corner and up the road a bit having been torn down and merged with a congregation in town. The school house too at the intersection of County Highways 73 and 50 had been closed for decades, its school mistresses no longer boarding at the farm.
Yes, the neighborhood was quiet now. The red screen door at the kitchen banging and squeaking less and less as it fell into only occasional use or was completely gone, having been replaced with something new and vinyl. Yet I imagine a time when kids, a teacher, two grown men, and a farm hand kept that door busy from sun up to sun down with Mabel wondering when Ted would get around to oiling the darn thing. Now, its infrequent squeak signaled something different for Mabel maybe—something to look forward to.
So we went, my dad, brother, and I. It may have been over a decade since I had been up to the farm. The Ohman homestead was sold while I was still in grade school and now some other structure stood where once the pioneer log cabin had. “The farm” on which Great Aunt-Mabel had spent most of her life and as everyone still calls it, was one of the only family places left in the area that I had any known connection too.
Chicago Road Map
My brother and I both lived in Chicago at the time of Mable’s invitation. Dad drove over from Moline, picking us up at Peter’s apartment and we drove up through Wisconsin with its hills and limestone cliffs on Interstate 94 toward the twin cities. We merged onto highway 10 outside the cities climbing north and west toward Wadena.
Ted and Mabel’s farm wasn’t the original land for our family. The original homesteads sat along County Highway 73—the farms of Olaus and Annicka Anderson and Petter (Peter) and Johanna Johanson (Johnson). When Swan and Pete, twin sons of Petter and Johanna, were ready for their own adventure they struck out down the road and to the left to buy land most likely from the railroad and make something of it.
And they did.
Pete married first, a woman named Emma, and the three lived together on the farm until Pete sold out to Swan. Pete then moved over to the original Johnson homestead about the time Swan married Beda Anderson, Olaus and Annicka’s daughter. Swan’s sons, Ted and Ock, officially took over the farm upon Swan’s death in 1920 and farmed for decades together.
So as Swan, Beda, Ted, Ock, and a whole host of other family members resided in their resting places up the road in the Compton Swedish Lutheran Cemetery or in the Gustafva Cemetery a little farther away on that last day of September in 1994, Great Aunt Mabel threw her picnic and once again, the neighborhood teamed with family and life.
Amidst all the doings of the day, Mabel showed us the family artifacts she had in her possession. A small group sat in the dining room, a room full of fabulous food memories, looking at the family bible, a Swedish psalm book, and my Grandmother Emma’s favorite prayer. Mabel seemed sad that I had spent so little time up in this neck of the woods. She wondered what I even remembered of the Ohman cabin which was nothing like the large farmhouse she now sat in.
The Matchbox
“The match box,” is what I told her. It hung on the kitchen wall at the Ohman cabin painted along with everything else every time Grandma Emma felt the need. I remember it being yellow or light pink and the smell of its matches lighting the stove each morning. It seemed such a small thing but it’s the small things that stand out for us as children.
Match boxes are an old tool from the days of when lighting the morning fire was one of life’s main necessities. Search the term online and see the many boxes from around the world that show up. At one time a matchbox was a mainstay of every home. This one hung by a small mirror near the back door that faced the barn and water pump and wasn’t much to look at.
Matches
Thinking back it was really nothing. A piece of tin molded into a shape to fit the rectangular match boxes of the day with a receptacle at the bottom for catching stray matches. It even had the word “matches” popping out of the tin and a little hole at the top for hanging. Like so many things on the farm the match box was strictly utilitarian.
“Oh, that old thing,” said Great Aunt Mabel, “It’s out in the shed,” I probably just nodded and smiled in response. While these were my people, I had not grown up around them. Their ways were both familiar and foreign to me. Why Mabel would have kept the Ohman’s match box was beyond my understanding.
At any rate the picnic was a huge success, a day full of family happy to see each other, walks back to the creek running through the property, and lots of food! I think we were all sad to leave late that afternoon. But it was time to head for Minneapolis and back to Chicago. Dad dropped Peter and I at the airport in the evening and we flew back to Chicago—Peter for graduate school and I to begin a new job on Monday.
Early the next morning, I put on the same denim dress I had worn the day before. I was a bit tired from my travels and feeling ambivalent about this new job which was nowhere near my “dream” job. Maybe I also missed the gathering of clan, the collective memories of visiting still clinging to my dress.
Sometime during the morning of October 1, 1994 I was introduced to my new co-workers. A man named Tony remembers thinking at the time of our meeting that my dress was wrinkled (which it was). Wrinkled or not, ten months and five days after Great Aunt Mabel’s last picnic, Tony and I married. So much for first impressions…
Mabel couldn’t make the wedding but sent a gift which we opened the day after. Unwrapped, we found a set picnic placemats reminding me of what seemed the penultimate event to what had just happened the day before.
Picnic Placemat
But underneath the placemats was something more. The old match box gleamed up at us, stripped and restored to its original tin. Tony had no idea what this thing was. But I did! A bit battered and scratched, it moved me the way only acts of deep understanding can. Mabel was reminding me of something deeper than just a picnic.
It took a few years of moving around the country before Tony and I hung the match box. Like many of our possessions in the early years of our marriage, it remained boxed up with other gifts or trinkets from our separate travels or lives before each other. Now the matchbox hangs next to our modern gas stove which will never need its usefulness. The receptacle overflows with matches for our dinner candles and not our daily bread.
I saw Mabel one last time the summer of 2001. She was off the farm living in a nursing home I think in Fergus Falls. She lay in bed and held my hand. That’s what I remember. Mabel died the next summer.
One of Mabel’s granddaughters lived on the farm for a while. But here not so long ago, it too was sold only for the buildings to come back on the market recently. Maybe the old place can’t satisfy itself amidst strangers–people who are not släkt . The farm had, after all, become the clan’s stronghold for the generations still living. Its erasure which may be inevitable leaves us only with what we can carry with us as the landless people we now are–our memories, our stories, and bits and pieces of a time no longer in existence.
I’m sweeping, collecting grit, crumbs, hair, and bits of this and that from the wood floor. The movement, back and forth, back and forth across the floor, calms my already mounting anxieties about the day. Back and forth, under and around, left and right my broom and I move across the floor of our home leaving small piles here and there to be swept up with the dust bin and washed down the kitchen sink—a practice my family finds disgusting.
My daily request is for no one to barge through my morning reverie scattering the accumulation of my work (an offering of sorts to the ancient Gods of home and hearth) back into the corners of our life. “Don’t step in the pile,” is a directive my children learned from me and use often when given the sweeping chore.
My mother sniffs a bit about my sweeping habit. “Just moving the dust around,” she comments when she observes me at this task. Her words sound more like copy for a 1950’s vacuum cleaner advertisement than the mother I know and love. But because she is my mother, I do admit she may have a point…
My husband too doesn’t understand my need to sweep. He loves the vacuum and doesn’t realize how disturbing I find the noise. The burr of the motor halts all conversation in our home disrupting my sense of life’s musical pitch . Vacuuming relaxes my husband. But for me the pushing forward and back of the machine feels like work. Sweeping is a dance—to the right. Pull in. Right pull in. Step to the right, out and pull in again.
Yet I don’t sweep to just rid our home of its souvenirs from last night’s dinner, soccer game mud, winter road sand, midnight snacks, or dust bunnies. I don’t sweep just to have a few moments of silence or to meditate or as a form of exercise. I don’t sweep in opposition to my mother or husband.
Shed broom
Women have swept their homes in all seasons for thousands of years whether that home was a tent, long house, earthen stuga, log cabin, farm house, apartment, or suburban ranch. Women have swept up after others as daughters, servants, slaves, wives, mothers, and grandmothers. Women have swept up after a house full of people or only one or two. Women have swept even when there was nothing more to sweep.
Of course men sweep. But the lineage of this action in the home is still young, just decades old and in its infancy by comparison. For women, the lineage of sweeping runs deep, long, and universally through our connective molecules to antiquity.
The real reason I sweep with an old style broom spurning modern conveniences such as vacuums, sweeper cloths, and vacuum sticks is because this ancient, non-mechanized, daily task connects me to the past, my past, and in doing so to every woman I am descended from. This connection is not factual, does not contain primary or secondary sources, or even handed-down stories. This connection is visceral and not quantifiable.
Swedish hearth broom and Filipino brooms for rice.
Oh I admit the practice began out of necessity. The crumbs of my life by myself and then with others needed tending to. A simple broom was cheap by comparison to other sweeping tools when money was short. But this ancient ritual of making ready for the day, whether in the morning or evening, over time and experience became gift giving. Somehow an emotional door opened, allowing me access to my sisters across time. I felt the ancient stories of their lives told through this daily chore as we shared sweeping with song and dance when full of joy, good news, and accomplishment or with the slow methodical movements when lost in in the sorrow of bad news, illness, worries over children, or the death of loved ones.
As women, we sweep because we tell ourselves it must be done. Yet maybe I still sweep because this connection to the past with the movement of the broom grounds me to the earth from which I have come and will one day return. The swish of the broom is the tick of the clock, the set of the sun at evening, the rise in the morning, and a routine which allows me to think when thinking seems impossible.
My broom swings again to the right pulling crumbs toward me. Apple pie crust, kale chips, a vitamin, and dust bunny join together forming my first pile of the day. I swing out again pulling in more and in doing so hear women who are strangers to me. Their time and place beyond my knowledge of life. Yet with each movement, I sense their joys, sorrows, frustrations knowing on an emotional, non-verbal level these women tell their stories in the only way they can—through the chores which defined their daily existence.
We are not so different, these women I do not have names for or who have passed on within my lifetime or who are still in my life. We sweep across countries, states, towns, land, language, era, occupation, and human rights joined together by a simple, repeating, movement. We are bond together like straw, woven with string to make a broom. We are a sisterhood, sharing as best we can our crumbs, hopes, and dreams.
The Johnson twins, Swan and Pete, did not take advantage of being confirmed with their fifteen year old sister Emma in 1880 when the first Lutheran confirmation occurred in Compton Township, Minnesota. They didn’t budge the next year either when Swan’s future wife, Beda at age fourteen, was confirmed.
Now one might think these two had been confirmed at an earlier date. The custom in pioneer Swedish communities was to confirm around the age of fourteen or so. But in 1880 Swan and Pete were twenty years of age—men by the standards of their day.
In 1874 when the twins were of the confirming age, the family was farming in Dakota County near Rosemount, Minnesota. In 1875 they show up in the Minnesota Census as a part of a small group of forty-four Swedes mixed in among a lot of Irish immigrants, a few Germans, and maybe a couple of Norwegians.
Bible Book Binding
Now there wasn’t a Lutheran church in sight of Rosemount at the time. One popped up in Hastings in 1871. But Hasting was about fifteen to twenty miles from their whereabouts in Dakota County and not a trip to make very often on poor roads and in certain types of weather.
Sweden at the time only allowed one Christian denomination by law. You were either Lutheran or risking incarceration. The twins’ parents, Peter Johnson and Johanna Anderson, were both confirmed Lutheran Christians. Their confirmations were duly noted in the Swedish household examination records of the time along with other particulars such as birth dates and small pox vaccinations.
Once in the new land many Swedish immigrants chartered new Lutheran congregations or joined existing ones. Others however went in search of something novel and now legal. Swedes seeking spiritual change account for the Swedish Baptist, Swedish Methodist, and Swedish Covenant churches throughout Minnesota. Still some Swedes sought some spiritual peace opting to leave faith matters of any kind behind them in the hills of their homeland.
There was a Methodist Church near the family in Dakota County. It was incorporated in 1868 and the building was being built in 1874. The church is on the 1879 plat map of Rosemount way over in the Western corner of section 30. I’m not sure the family had pietistic leanings though. There’s no mention in the family legend of anything of this sort. And being it was a German Methodist congregation (and not a Swedish Methodist congregation) makes me think the family may have shied away from it.
Swan and Pete however as well as their older brother Johan Gustaf and their younger sister Betsey all came of confirming age while living in Dakota County. With few choices, what did the family do? Travel to Hastings? Confirm in the Methodist Church? Or chose to do nothing?
Born February 15th, 1860 in Carver County, Minnesota, Andrew Peter and Svante would have had plenty of opportunity to be baptized. Carver County was an active Swedish community boasting two Swedish Lutheran churches within five miles of each other and within the area the Johnson family was living at the time with another family from home. The twins were born twenty months after their parents landed in Boston, Massachusetts and nineteen months after their brother, Johan Gustaf, was born. Surrounded by family and friends from home, life in Carver County was most likely full of past traditions.
Church records for the East Union Lutheran Church in Carver County are messy and difficult to decipher. However, while not stellar, the church records of the Compton Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church prove legible. The records note the twins were baptized in 1860 in Carver County. Reading on, a small and somewhat messy notation in Swenglish written in these same church records indicate that 1909 was a big year for the twins. At forty-nine years of age Swan, Pete, and Swan’s son Fredie (age fourteen or so) where all confirmed in the Compton Church.
Psalmboken
We may never know what prompted this late confirmation. One thought is that their mother’s death the year prior caused the twins to do some thinking on spiritual matters. Perhaps they knew Johanna regretted not finding a way to have her children confirmed in Dakota County. Maybe the twins’ confirmation was fulfillment of their mother’s final wish.
Well that is one thought. My other thought lies within the power of Beda Anderson Johnson.
Beda, according to legend, spoke her mind. She could have nagged Swan at precisely the most aggravating yet effective moment about this confirmation thing. The couple already had one child confirmed in 1907 and now another one was ready to go. Yet here was the father still unconfirmed and living just down the road from the church!
Slowly over time, Swan could have weakened. Can’t a man get any peace in his own home? Maybe not. So Swan could have trudged across the fields over to Pete’s house one evening seeking some brotherly solace. As was their custom, the twins could settled into shooting the breeze around the table at twilight. Eventually after a few Swedish silences, Swan could have raised the topic of confirmation. A few silences later Pete could have nodded and said, “Yah. I tink I vill be yoining you, Svaney.”
Like music I can hear a roll of Compton chuckles spill out over the table, the children listening and Emma smiling as she finishes up the dishes. Then I imagine Swan and Pete sighing in surrender to the matrimonial fates conceding without words that the power of two women in cahoots is not to be reckoned with.
And I think I’ll just leave it at that—a few interesting facts about the cloud of witnesses who came before me rolled into a whole lot of conjecture about another time and another place that makes for somewhat of a passable story to tell.
The Swedish language of the Minnesota pioneers.
SOURCES
Federal Census of 1860 for Carver County, Minnesota.
Minnesota State Census of 1875 for Rosemount in Dakota County, Minnesota.
Records for the bark, Minona, accessed at the the Swenson Swedish Immigration Center at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
Rosemount Plat Map of 1879. Courtesy of the Dakota County Historical Society. Accessed 9/28/2012.
If you left the Prairie Cemetery, take a trip back in your mind. Wander around the grounds looking for archeological clues—clues as to where the church building—Den Swenska Evangeliska Lutherska Gustafwa stood from 1885 to 1931.
Maybe the church stood here?Land over looking County Highway 77.
Oh it was there alright at one time. Gustafva was one of two Swedish Lutheran churches the early Swedish pioneers built in Compton Township, Otter Tail County, Minnesota. There was a bit of a disagreement as to the whereabouts of the new church and that’s why the community ended up with two—Gustafva in section ten and Svenska Evangeliska Lutherska i Compton in section twenty.
Travel from section twenty, where a number of Swedish families were homesteading, up to section ten for church would have been by my calculations four to six miles. Now given that the roads were rough, the weather often bad, and South Bluff Creek had to be crossed the mere act of getting to church was most likely difficult most of time. Having a church nearby would be an eventual necessity for the section twenty families. Much easier to move one pastor between two churches than to move a whole group of people.
The Compton church dilemma reminds me of the story my friend Marilyn at the Carver County Historical Society told me about the East Union Lutheran Church and the West Union Lutheran Church. The congregations are a little over five miles apart but five miles during pioneer times was nothing like the bike ride it is now. No paved roads. No bridges. No snow removal. The early pioneers in West Union had trouble crossing Beven’s Creek when it was high. A group broke off from East Union to form a congregation closer and safer to home.
Back in Compton Township, early Scottish pioneer Mrs. James Strang writes about crossing Oak Creek from section ten to get into Wadena on Fourth of July some time in the 1870’s. She writes,
The country was flooded with so much rain. We had the oxen…when we got to the creek, it was up over the fields. We had to wade into the poles across the creek, the men carrying the children over first. The creek was rampant…the men tackled the oxen but they got caught by the horns of the second team and they had a hard time getting them out. The wagon was swept down the creek; lunches and all got wet through (page 180 Compton Township History).
Although Scottish, Mrs. Strang has a connection to Gustafva. According to her recollections, she and her husband arrived in Compton Township in June of 1873 staying their first night with Nels Rolen. Nels was a Swede and the man along with his wife Ingard who sold a bit of land –about two acres for $5 in 1880—for what would become the Gustafva church and cemetery.
Now also in 1880, a man of the Lutheran cloth, one J.P. Lundblad out of Parker’s Prairie, enters into the story. Hard to know what came first—the missionary or the land. But at some point Lundblad began a confirmation class in the Robb School House at the lower end of section 11 near section 14. The schoolhouse was built in 1877 on what looks like James Robb’s land but it could have been Thomas Robb’s land. At any rate, the Robbs came from Scotland too and were neighbors to the Strangs.
The Johnson twins down in section twenty, Swan and Peter, had a younger sister Emma who was confirmed in this first class with J.P. Lundblad. The next year Swan’s future wife and my great grandmother, Beda Anderson, was confirmed. Swan and Pete didn’t seem to make it into either class.
Cemetery Stones
At any rate after Nels Rolen sold the land, the community needed it first for a cemetery times being what they were. So by the time Charles Veden of section four was keeping his church building dairy in 1885, the cemetery had sixteen graves in it. The cemetery alone appears on the 1884 Plat Map of Compton Township.
Veden writes, which in itself is interesting because most Swedes at this time did not, about the “very cold Northwest winds” he encountered during the early days of the church which makes the grove of trees in the cemetery sensible even if they look to be too young to have seen the early days of this place . At any rate, the church structure was 12 by 20 feet and made out of log and sat “along the current highway 29” (page 31 Compton Township History). I found a pole tarp on the internet measuring 12 by 20. It looked like something you might park your car or fishing boat under. Not a big structure by our standards by any means.
Trees and Stones
Charles Veden reports the first meeting at the church occurred on August 21, 1885 with a Pastor Olson preaching. Who knows how many Swedes squeezed into the church on a possibly hot and humid Minnesota August day. Twenty-six years later in April of 1911, the congregation (församling in Swedish) filed with the State of Minnesota to transfer the Gustafva property to the Compton church and the two congregations merged. The log church structure was moved in 1931 and no more is known about its history. What remains is the cemetery with all its secrets and stories and a primitive monument to the early Swedish pioneers.
SOURCES
Compton Township History Ottertail County Minnesota: 1875-2001.
U.S. Federal Census of 1880/Minnesota/OtterTail County/Compton Township. Accessed through Heritage Quest on April 15, 2015.
Kyrko Bok fon Svenska Evangeliska Lutherska Compton Forsamlingen. Swedish American Church Archives, 3-240.
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management General Land Office Records. www.glorecords.blm.gov. Assessed on April 1, 2015.
Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez 