Ties That Bind

Sorry for the cliché title. It's the best I could do under the circumstances, and it's my hope that it will fake you into thinking there might be some quilty content, like tying a quilt or attaching a binding. The real situation is that I'll be on the road this weekend, so I have to sacrifice my usual Saturday post. I'm trying to fit in a word or two between quilting classes at church (two sections of “Dancing on the Head of a Pin...” started today/Wednesday) and baking a cake for my flute choir. I'll slap this up sometime before I leave on Friday morning at 6:00 a.m.

We silver flute tooters are playing our last gig of the season Thursday evening, and plan to pig out on some uber-chocolate cake as a reward. I may or may not have told you, but cake is my favorite food, though I don't even think it is officially a food. Regardless, while I'm at church anyway with the dang quilters, I may as well discuss eating the cake with one of the pastors. I may need some sort of pre-absolution. I have an “in” with one of them, because I baked this cake for his last birthday, and he didn't bat an eye as he glommed it down. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Hubba visibly relaxed and enjoyed his piece after assessing Pastor Bryan's reaction. Up until then, I think Hubba assumed I was walking on the edge. Making and eating this particular cake rates quite high on the sin-o-meter.

The road trip is a new tradition my younger sister Lora and I cooked up with The Barn. Last summer we accompanied him to Madison, Minnesota, for the 125th anniversary of Minnesota Valley Lutheran Church. In 1997, he and I traveled alone back to Madison for the same celebration at Borgund Lutheran Church. Both churches are situated among the prairie farms outside of Madison proper, in southwest Minnesota. Grandpa and Grandma Onerheim moved to Madison from Big Timber, Montana, when The Barn (known in those days as "Bun") was three-years-old, and they lived there until he was well out of the family nest. Grandpa had both of these congregations, and they are served by one pastor yet today. These were Norwegian Synod churches (Norwegian Lutheran Church of America), and Grandpa presided there when the decision was made to discontinue singing the hymns in Norwegian. Those were dicey times.

A picture on the wall of our library was taken at “The 2nd Extraordinary Convention. Norwegian Lutheran Church of American (sic), Minneapolis, June 1922.” My dad would have been five-years-old at the time. This is one of those yard-long panoramic photos, and there must be as least 500 people who posed for it. When I finally located him in the photograph, Grandpa Onerheim is in the dead center. Figures.

Madison provides the setting for a great deal of Onerheim lore. Like the time my Aunt Ruth asked to perform for the congregation a new poem she had learned. “Yah, shoor, let's hear what Ruthie has memorized.” She bounded to the steps that lead up to the altar, in the front of the white-frame church, before every attentive and eager Nordic eye, Reverend Onerheim's precocious blond daughter.

“I am a little Dutchman and I like to drink beer
'til my belly sticks clear out to here!”

Uh, okay, you can sit down now, Ruthie... I don't think you were even supposed to say “belly” in the Norwegian Synod.

This is also where my dad remembers playing under the quilt frame in the parlor, as I mentioned before. I've seen the house, with the room upstairs where the widowed Grandma Snorteland would come to spend winters with my dad's family. Grandpa Onerheim fixed up a bedroom for her, and even put a little mock kitchen in it so she felt as though she had a place of her own. The six kids made do with the other bedrooms somehow, and whenever The Barn has related the story, he never indicates that anyone felt put out with the arrangement. To the contrary.

Aunt Margarette's misfortune happened in Madison. She became “an invalid”. A bicycle ran over her toe, and she contracted osteomyelitis. The Barn told us that if it happened today (today being when we were young), a shot of penicillin would probably have taken care of the whole problem. Instead, Aunt Margarette spent most of her life battling the effects of this minor incident. One leg stopped growing altogether, and she always wore a built-up shoe that my dad had the prisoners in Fort Madison, Iowa, make. Her hip joints and the elbow on her right arm froze, and she was never able to bend them again. She walked slightly bent over, and when she sat, her legs jutted out from the long skirts she wore to mask her condition. She taught piano lessons for years, but as she played, she needed to bend into the piano on her right side to accommodate her resistant arm.

One day I was looking through some old family photographs. I found one with about ten or a dozen young people. They were all dressed fashionably for the day, the girls with the requisite monster bow on whichever side of their heads was opposite the parts in their hair. Some of the kids were reclining, and I noticed some were sitting in what, at second look, were wheelchairs. As I studied this curious picture, I noticed a young Aunt Margarette on a bed. When I asked my dad what this picture was, he said, “Oh, that's Margarette's confirmation class. She was confirmed at the Home for Hopelessly Crippled Children.” The moment that comment was made is indelible in my memory, and my respect remains for the courage of my maiden aunt, as she negotiated through the years of society's shame. Aunt Margarette died when she was in her mid-eighties, and I joined The Barn for her funeral in Brookings, South Dakota. It was the first time in my life I saw him cry, another permanent imprint for my mind's eye.

Lora and I are the two offspring to remain in Iowa. We just like it here. You'd think we would hang out together all the time, considering we are two hours apart, and the other three siblings are in Boston, North Carolina, and Seattle. Alas, our schedules and the schedules of our own offspring have almost always prevented it. Last summer, when the three of us had so much fun on the Madison trip, we made a pact to take a summer jaunt together as long as we could.

The youngest two, Lora and I grew up under the diminutive dual moniker of “the little girls”. Honestly. There are all of eight years between my oldest brother Paul and my younger sister Lora. "The little girls”, indeed. Big whoop. When Paul introduced us to his girlfriend-now-wife Carol, she was dumbfounded. We were teenagers to Paul's twenty-oneness. “I thought you said they were little!”

Lora was awful cute. Still is, but when she was little, she was precious-cute. There were the blond braids held in place with the aid of “Suave”. I didn't know what “Suave” was, but it came in a bottle, and when The Peg or Mrs. Lester would put it in Lora's hair, her braids didn't fall apart so fast. Braids, with little short bangs fringing high on her forehead. I felt very protective of her, and my heart broke 180 times when I was in the first grade. I had to leave her every day outside the kindergartner's door at Wildwood Elementary, to fend without me. That pang of duty remains.

The Peg always did things to make each of us feel special. She and Lora would play “The Crazies”. Lora was devoted to our mother from the earliest age until Mom's unexpected death in 2002. As a youngster, she wanted to be physically close to her mama, as well, and she needed The Peg to engage with her on every level. She and our mother would embrace, and they would roll over and over onto the bouncy bed, singing and laughing together, “We are The Crazies, we are The Crazies!” Joyful memories, happy sounds heard from another room.

Lora was learning cause and effect relationships, probably around age five or six. Being the youngest, she didn't have the opportunity to think for herself very often. As I hearken back on this, she must have found it quite annoying to have two brothers and two sisters make so many decisions for her. It was such a profound aggravation, I think she steels herself against it even now. She wanted to figure things out for herself, but that was pretty tough when somebody not even a head taller than she provided solutions without solicitation. Sometimes she just kept things to herself; that way, she could go from start to finish and figure out how and why something happened. For me, it could be knee-slapping hilarious, if not some of the cutest stuff I'd ever heard!

“Mama, my stomach hurts. Do you think it's because I licked all the frost off the windows?”

Tummy aches were often the cause of her pondering. My personal favorite was:

“Mama, my stomach hurts. Do you think it's because I sucked on those tea bags in the sink?”

These days, Lora purposely cracks me up. She has a delightful sense of humor, and a take on life that is distinctly her own.

Early this Friday morning I'll meet my sister and The Barn in Hampton, and we'll head north on I35, picking up I90 once we're inside Minnesota. We're skipping Madison this year. Instead, we're going to our great-grandparent's farm, spending the first night of our second-year traditional escape in Watertown, South Dakota. We Onerheims don't mess around when it comes to getting from Point A to Point B. Seven straight hours on the road is child's play.

We'll scope out the entire area, where ever the farm is, and get more memories from The Barn about his generation. Our lodgings Saturday night are in Brookings. The First Lutheran Church there was Grandpa Onerheim's last call, and Aunt Margarette lived in Brookings her remaining years. We will go to church there on Sunday morning, and later visit the final resting places of The Reverend and Mrs. L.O. Onerheim and their daughter Margarette, the piano teacher. Aunt Margarette, whose simple life bore the pain and courage of the cross she had to bear, and on whose back we eventually learned compassion and appreciation for our own simple lives.

So, off we go. I'll do my best to remember some of The Barn's stories. They are always so rich. I'll keep my eyes open for anything fabric, and perhaps next week I'll provide a real Threadquarters report, one that actually mentions something quilt-related.

I got you with the stupid title, though, didn't I?

Copyright © June 2005 Kari E.O. Burns