Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

We are having a warm, dry fall here in my small corner of Iowa this year. Dust and leaves blow across the fields even when no one is busy harvesting. Harvest of course makes more dust as the cut corn or beans spread their smells across our yards. For a few weeks tractors and combines own our roads as they travel from farm to farm. Behemoths, they hold us urban drivers at bay steaming in our misplaced need to hurry life along.

Fall’s cooler mornings remind me winter is indeed on its way. I itch to leave my summer muesli breakfast behind for hot, steaming bowls of oatmeal covered in maple syrup and topped with tart farm apples dusted in cinnamon. Like most people now, I often use my microwave speeding the process along. My real day, of course, begins after breakfast is over don’t you know. But when I have the inclination or need the slowness of the process, I return once again to a pot over the fire.

Oatmeal seems ancient to me, something I am genetically predisposed to and embedded in my DNA. Years ago I learned to soak old fashioned oats a bit before stirring them gently in a pot over my stove fire ever careful of a possible bubble over. The process of creating a bowl of this steamy stuff feels more like an inherited ritual to me. I imagine my mother, her mother, and the mother before her also stirring pots of porridge over their stoves–electric, gas, wood, or coal– many a morning once upon a time.

Eating oatmeal is old in my lineage. But it’s predecessors, gruel and porridge, are ancient. For my ancestors such a meal was the most common of daily fares. Gruel is “liquid food made from meal”. At least that’s what Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary tells me. The word gruel is related to grout which is a course meal, its plural being grounds and also to groat which is hulled grain. Gruel in Danish is gröd meaning “boiled grouts” .The Swedish word is gröt meaning “thick pap” and the Norwegian word is similar, grøt.

While the grain for gruel or porridge can be oats, corn, or wheat, in the Scandinavian countries, barley was often the grain of choice for my ancestors. In the region of Sweden my ancestors hail from, Västergötland, a pot of porridge was on the table for every meal. So common and necessary was gruel to the Northern people that it made the journey from one land to the next. In 1838, Norwegian Ole Rynning advised his fellow countrymen “that barley gruel flavored with wine is frequently strengthening and helpful” on the sea journey to the new world.

Many of us with ties to Scandinavian Minnesota grew up eating at least a few of our morning meals of oats or cereal under the praying hands of Eric Enstrom’s photo “Grace”–an older man giving thanks for his daily bread and bowl of gruel. My maternal grandmother placed a copy of this photo over her kitchen table reminding us all of a simple and austere past spanning the old country with the new.

Milled oat groats sometimes called Scottish Oats. — Ground oat groats milled in the old water mill way sometimes called Scottish Oats.

Rolled grains, like my morning oatmeal or even our modern cereal, are a relatively new technology. Oat groats are steamed and then rolled into flakes. Before the invention of the “roller” in 1877 by the Quaker Oats Company, the best a peasant woman might do was to begin with hulled grain (groats). If possible, the grain was ground at a local water mill called a skvaltkvarn in Sweden. But if not, the hulled grain was soaked overnight and cooked for a few hours over the fire. In Sweden, women used a three-legged cast iron pot for gröt which was placed in the open fireplace to cook. The grain was moistened by water and served with maybe a little butter, sour milk, and sweetened with lingon, a tart, wild berry similar to cranberries.

The dish does not seem dependent on milk or butter however. Cows, if a peasant family had them, stopped producing milk in late winter/early spring since feeding cattle all winter was often difficult. To this day many people cook their modern day gruel in water some topping it off with milk and others not.

I vaguely remember I scene in the movie Babette’s Feast in which the sisters make a cousin to porridge. It’s called something like ale bread soup and is made out of dried bread. The sisters carry bowls of this porridge soup to their ailing neighbors in wooden boxes. I’m sure these boxes made of bentwood had many uses. But carrying porridge seems to be one of them.

I am busy now gathering the ingredients and recipes to make my own Scandinavian porridge from barley. I hope to share this grand adventure into my ancestors’ (and maybe yours too) peasant past in the very near future. But I also have this recurrent guilty, niggling, nudge that I should for the first time make the traditional Norwegian fest food rømmegrøt (sour cream porridge) . I’ve never wanted to make it but maybe the ancestors (the Norwegian ones anyway) are whispering in my ear…

SOURCES

Centergran, Ulla and Martenius, Ingela. A Few Notes on Traditional Swedish Food. Accessed on March 23, 2015 at web.comhem.se.

Peters, Charles (ed). The Girl’s Own Indoor Book, pages 405-411. Published by The Religious Tract Society in 1888. I found it at https://books.google.com/books/about/The_girl_s_own_indoor_book_ed_by_C_Peter.html?id=-WIVAAAAQAAJ on October 22, 2015.

The blog My Little Norway: Discover the Kingdom of the North accessed October 22, 2015 at http://mylittlenorway.com/2014/11/traditional-norwegian-grot/; http://mylittlenorway.com/2011/12/old-norwegian-grot-recipe/; and http://mylittlenorway.com/2011/12/hanna-winsnes-the-first-norwegian-cook-book/

Learn all about grains at http://blog.bobsredmill.com/featured-articles/steel-cut-rolled-instant-scottish/ accessed on October 22, 2015.

Rynning, Ole. Ole Rynning’s True Account of America. First published in 1838. Now available at http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/2/v02i04p220-269.pdf. Accessed on October 26, 2015.

Johnson, Dennis L. The shot seen ‘round the world: The story of a famous picture. In Swedish American Genealogist. Volume 34. December 2014. Published by the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center, Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.

For photos of a skvaltkvarn (Swedish water mill), check out http://www.kringla.nu/kringla/objekt?referens=raa/bbr/21000001025135

The Västergötlands Museum accessed almost daily in October and November of 2015 at http://vastergotlandsmuseum.se/sv/Vastarvet/Verksamheter/Vastergotlands-museum/

Minnesota

COMMON CURSING: WORDS FROM WAY BACK WHEN

October 9, 2015October 9, 2015 Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

At about the age of ten, I made an enlightening discovery: The world is populated with people other than Scandinavian Lutherans.

Surrounded as I was by typical Scandinavian surnames–Johnson, Anderson, Arneson, Carlson, Erikson, Swanson, and many variations of Leaf—how could I think otherwise? These names dotted the local mailboxes, filled our telephone book, and populated my classes at school. Many men and boys still had first names which also served as part of their last names—Arne Arneson, Erik Erikson, John Johnson, Knut Knutson, and Pete Peterson. These combinations were easy to remember and fun to say when using the inherent ethnic lilt.

As for Lutheranism, my father used to joke that there was a Lutheran church on every corner around our stretch of Illinois. First Lutheran, Faith Lutheran, Emmanual Lutheran, Calvary Lutheran, Trinity, St. John, St. Matthew, St. Paul, St. This, and St. That. These churches spouted even more surnames ending in either “son” or “sen” such as Monsen, Gunderson, and Gustafson. The endings typically depended on the original ancestors’ origins but sometimes had been changed during the process of emigration. Literacy levels and standardized spelling were different way back when than today. However, I knew at a young age that typically “son” at the end of a name meant a Swede and “sen” meant a Norseman or Dane.

Regardless of where the boat sailed from all the members of my childhood cultural clan drank weak coffee morning, noon, and night and ate many variations of kringle, lefse, herring, and lutfisk especially at holiday time. Our Lutheran congregation hosted a typical Scandinavian first Sunday in Advent vespers service and a number of smorgasbords throughout the year instead of potlucks. These bords boasted plates of potato sausage, spritz cookies in every shape possible, potatoes mashed, creamed, and scalloped along with the now famous Lutheran molded, jiggling salads which I believe were not a practice imported from the old countries.

Trips to Minnesota served to further imprint my family’s origins in me. As our car headed West and North along two lane highways, the language spoken at each stop took on even more of a lilt reaching a peak once we sat down to visit the relatives. The words, in English, bobbed up and down like music accompanied by chuckles, head nods, tongue tucking, and decorated here and there with words and phrases from Norway or Sweden—leftovers from my older relatives languages of infancy.

Then there was this way of not speaking more prominent on the farm than in town. The lilting language often silenced or replaced by the wind rustling through the crops or the wind chimes dancing on the breeze. These were people who knew how to be quiet. Many a sentence hung in the air before anyone bothered to respond since contemplation of the spoken word was something still of value.

Now the Scandinavian lilt of my childhood languishes a bit, being not so prominent anymore. Oh it still remains but it is not refueled by an older generation now mostly gone or newly arrived immigrants learning English. New immigrants now are quite fluent in English and their accents a bit more modern having been exposed to the whole world via the screen. And the silences? Well I suppose they can still be found tucked in here or there. Maybe though they have just been replaced by needing to check one’s cellphone for messages.

Recently and quite by accident, I began collecting bits and pieces of this way of speaking. Sitting around my mother’s table visiting relatives fell into remembrances of growing up in a Minnesota small town populated by Norwegians. Snakker du Norsk? (Do you speak Norwegian?) transported them quickly to the words and sayings that children love to collect and say when grown-ups are otherwise occupied. Whether my grandmothers labeled these words and sayings true cursing is debatable. They are however mostly negative utterances which for adults at the time constituted culturally acceptable ways of, if not cursing, letting off some steam.

Here’s my collection, thus far.

Uff da

Possibly the most used, beloved, and recognizable Norwegian negative utterance in the United States. Fodder for coffee mugs, t-shirts, dish towels, and other items used as membership proof of entrance into the unofficial Norwegian-American club, the actual term uff-da stems from the Norwegian word huff which is an emotional interjection akin to “ugh”. Da literally means then or indeed but can also just make the first word stronger more like a double ugh. Type uff-da into Google Translate and it comes up with whoops. Listen to my relatives and understand it also means, “I don’t believe it”, “that’s too bad”, “yuck” or even “that was a bad joke”. Uff-da, in its variety of uses, still to this day is a wonderful substitute for the now overly common curse word, sh_ _.

Uff da, nei da, takk nei takk

Initially, my mother thought my Swedish-American father was making fun of his Norwegian-American in-laws with this saying. But after a full-fledged linguistic search, I am of the opinion that my father was merely listening and mimicking his in-laws in a loving yet slightly jesting way.

Uff da and nei da are both negative expressions. Nei is Norwegian for no. Da gives the word it is attached to more strength. Strung together, Uff da, nei da seems to imply really bad stuff. The later part of this saying gave me a bit of trouble because my father’s pronunciation sounded more like tuck-i-tuck. But I am wondering if in fact tuck is really takk, the Norwegian word for thanks. Takk I takk literally means thanks to thanks but may imply a further negative if perchance it was instead takk nei takk which could mean thanks but no thanks. My current non-expert interpretation of Uff da nei da takk nei takk is Ugh, Yuck, thanks but no thanks!

Tongue Tisking and Tucking

Tucking and tisking are non-verbal communicative devices used by the older Swedish American women in my family most of who have passed on now. But back in the day instead of saying “it’s a shame” or “what’s the world coming to?”, these women would click their tongues right behind their teeth once or twice followed by brief silence and often accompanied by a shake of the head. I have strong memories of my paternal grandmother tisking her teeth. She often did so when she appeared to be thinking. So who knows what her meaning was or what she was thinking about.

Ish da fy da fanda

This saying comes from my Aunt Linda who writes.

I only remember that we said it when something was really icky! Not sure it was even a real word, but we said it. We thought it was kind of a cool word–maybe even a little risqué! That made us say it even more!!

I have no recollection of this saying. But it is fun to say! I did come across the Norwegian saying fy da which is an utterance similar to uff da only infused with more disgust as the breath bristles through teeth on its way to making the sound for the letter “f”. The “da’s” in the saying mean then or indeed or serve to make the saying more emphatic. Imagine putting the emphasis on the da. Ish DA! Fy DA! And fanda, if you can believe it, fanda is a form of the Norwegian noun which means “devil”. So this leaves us with a loose translation of “Icky, disgusting, devils!”

No wonder Aunt Linda had so much fun saying it.

Ish Kabibble

I’m sorry to disappoint. Ish Kabibble is not a saying native to Norway or Sweden or even Minnesota. I believe it’s a bit of popular American culture that was adopted by my relatives along the way and delivered with some sort of Scandinavian accent making it sound as if it sailed in from the old country.

As far as I can figure out Ish Kabibble may either have its origin in Yiddish meaning something like “don’t worry”. Or, it could come from Shakespeare’s term bibble, babble. At any rate the comedian Merwyn Bogue took it as his stage name and made it hugely popular back in another era and before my time. Whatever its true origin, Ish Kabibble is fun to say. Even more fun if the hands go up while saying it in a gesture of defeat. But a saying accompanied by movement may be too much to ask of any Scandinavian American.

Soda Bisca

My mother recalls Soda bisca as one of my father’s curse words of Swedish origin. I think perhaps she is incorrect. Soda bisca could however be the incantation of a native Swede trying to say soda biscuit which could sound more like soda bisca. Soda bisca, of course, is more acceptable to say if needed when the pastor visits than a Swedish curse word after all. So it seems to me the phrase could have come in handy. I imagine my father as a youngster hitting his thumb with a hammer inadvertently. Instead of cursing and receiving a slap from his mother, my father used SODA BISCA instead. I further fully suspect that he would not have known that the phrase wasn’t truly Swedish because all the old Swedes in the neighborhood probably used it. Perhaps the original pioneers thought it was cool to use an American way of pretend swearing instead of the old hum-drum Swedish ways. To further the issue of origin no old Swede in their quiet and retiring ways would think to explain the saying to a curious and growing boy.

Ish

If you’ve spent any time in Minnesota, you may have come across this little gem. Cousin Tiffany has the best ish West of the Mississippi always delivered with a descending pitch sliding into and extending the “sh”. It’s the precursor to “gross”, “nasty”, and “icky”. So instead of saying “this lutefisk tastes nasty” or “it tastes like sh—“, the Norwegian side of my family might instead screw up their faces and say ish. Only once mind you. Ish ish is not acceptable unless you are under three years of age. However ish da is acceptable as a more emphatic elicitation. But really, never once would one utter ish to a plate of lutefisk. My example is a poor one because there is no forgiveness for such a showing of non-ethnic support to the national dish of all Norwegian Americans. Even if grace is free and not just for Lutherans.

The Swedish Half-Smile

Now this is a tough one which lay dormant in my memory until recently. My husband’s colleague is of Swedish derivation. She is a big half-smiler, a mannerism my Filipino husband could not read and asked me to explain. Well explaining a non-verbal Swedish mannerism is like dragging the sailboat rudder up from the bottom of the lake. I knew exactly what it meant but had an awful time defining the darn thing to my bewildered husband. Sure Filipinos have their own non-verbal mannerisms. The upward moving chin is a classic affirmation. But the half-smile, well it’s no smile and that’s the first thing to understand about it.

My father used it when speaking to someone he clearly thought was wrong or inept or if he was receiving information he did not believe or did not want to hear. The Swedish half-smile contains sarcasm, triumph, contempt, awkwardness, or resignation, shown in what amounts to be the blink of an eye. It’s a quick communication. So quick you might miss it if you don’t happen to looking… which may be the point of it in the first place.

Sources

Tusen takk to:

Mom

Dad (in absentia and memory)

My sons’ creative use of language

Tony

Aunt Linda

Uncle Lee

Cousin Tiffany

Cousin Mary Beth

Cousin Nancy Jean

First Cousin Once Removed Kayla

Stokker and Haddal’s Norsk Nordmenn og Norge published by the University of Wisconsin Press. 1981.

Various internet sources which may or may not be substantiated with fact

World Wide Words accessed on July 23, 2015 at http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-ish1.htm

http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/NORWAY/2007-12/1198186236 accessed on July 29, 2015

Uncategorized

COMMON CURSING: PART ONE

September 4, 2015September 4, 2015 Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

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.

IMG_20150903_152436_394 — 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.

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?

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!

Compton Township

MABEL AND THE MATCH BOX

July 2, 2015 Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Stories

THE SISTERHOOD OF THE SIMPLE SWEEP

June 5, 2015 Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

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.

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.