Grandma Johnson gave me a pile of books, a green thumb and an ear for music.
Grandpa Johnson encouraged me to dress beautifully, praising how I looked in the new clothes he bought me.
Grandma Moan gave me the taste of bread freshly baked in her wood stove and water, freshly pumped from deep in the earth and the knowledge that an 80 year old woman could still chop wood.
Grandpa Moan gave me a vision of an angry Norse god shaking his cane like Thor, shaking the lightning, followed by the thunder of his Norwegian words.
Uncle Manley gave me the chance to overcome his abuse and my shame, and a deep-seated attunement to sex.
Dad gave me a two-wheel bike that I could grow into, a canoe that I could paddle alone around Side Lake, and a love for a neat and clean home.
Mom gave me the chance to be responsible for my sisters and brothers, a childhood with a soundtrack of crooners and show tunes, and a warm cuddle now & then.
Showing posts with label ancestors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ancestors. Show all posts
10 November 2008
06 October 2008
Happy Birthday to Me -- Where Do I Come From?
I arrived on the ripples of desire that Mom felt over 50 years ago when she first met Dad, at that Wisconsin dance hall. “He was real cute!” Mom still says with an excited giggle.
I was sparked by the sparkling of snow on Norwegian hillsides my Grandma Moan skied to school and also by the beams of midnight sun in the village where my Grandpa Moan learned to speak his stubborn, Norwegian mind. Those Nordic lights became holograms twinkling in my father’s eye.
I also sprang from Grandpa Johnson’s Swedish immigrant parents whose first six children died before the age of 3. Grandpa Johnson came at the right time to survive, to marry three times and father three daughters.
I was born here by my Grandma Johnson’s spacious womb, where my mother gently gestated, when I was just half of me, a Terra egg in Mom’s fetal ovaries. Mom breeched her way out into the world and I was waiting for the right time when Dad’s Norway and Mom’s mostly Sweden met to form my physical geography.
Then the spirit song that I am, sang through that baby landform, to populate it with a personhood that came to America to live long and prosper and create new vistas for those who would follow.
I was sparked by the sparkling of snow on Norwegian hillsides my Grandma Moan skied to school and also by the beams of midnight sun in the village where my Grandpa Moan learned to speak his stubborn, Norwegian mind. Those Nordic lights became holograms twinkling in my father’s eye.
I also sprang from Grandpa Johnson’s Swedish immigrant parents whose first six children died before the age of 3. Grandpa Johnson came at the right time to survive, to marry three times and father three daughters.
I was born here by my Grandma Johnson’s spacious womb, where my mother gently gestated, when I was just half of me, a Terra egg in Mom’s fetal ovaries. Mom breeched her way out into the world and I was waiting for the right time when Dad’s Norway and Mom’s mostly Sweden met to form my physical geography.
Then the spirit song that I am, sang through that baby landform, to populate it with a personhood that came to America to live long and prosper and create new vistas for those who would follow.
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