by Jenny Rose Ryan

My mother has icy blue eyes; when she's tired she stares blankly across the room and through you. She doesn't try to look oblivious as she fixates on the planter, the hutch, the hanging windchime in the yard. It seems that she shuts down, but as I speak to her, she answers without pause and it is as though the icy stare is a trick, a ruse, and a ploy to challenge assumptions. Perhaps she's just tired? In frigid midwinter, she eats her morning cereal like this, sipping coffee without blinking the frosty gaze.

Mom used to tell me how the hallways of her parents' old, wooden farmhouse became surrogate bedrooms as the family increased. I didn't believe her until proof arose in the form of a graying photo, her familiar tow-head peeking from behind a metal headboard jutting perpendicular from the white hallway wall. Here, her eyes were silver, still peering. A dresser formed a small wall that gave her a bit of privacy.

I longed for her childhood, filled with stories of floppy-eared beagles and calf-births in the barn. She learned to be both physically strong, and mentally fit through hard work on her parents’ farm. My own childhood, on a meager "hobby farm," felt somewhat mundane without the menial farm labor and the orange tabby cats shaved in lion-fashion by a mischievous older brother. Instead of riding horses and pulling weeds, I now lift weights and twirl locks of hair for long hours as I gaze into monitors and try to believe my consciousness is the same even though I'm addicted to the Internet. My maternal sunken-eyed Danish and Swedish Grandma Lucy always looked tired in the pictures, and though I recognize her chin in my own protruding silhouette, I find few reminders of her work-forged and callused hands on my own silken appendages. I remember being ten, when neither Mom nor Grandma shrieked as they scooped manure from a seafoam-green five-gallon bucket, filled consistently during garden-planting season from the neighbors' cow troughs. They'd plop it softly into the soil, covering the matter with the roots of seedling green beans and inches of deep, black dirt. I kneeled nearby, grimacing, and weaving long ropes of dandelions into leis and crowns. Mom said I wouldn't mind manure when I was older. I'm older, and I mind; though I wish I didn't. But I see their work-related tenacity and self-reliance in my other endeavors.

I often study a picture of Grandma Lucy, born May 10, 1918, holding a bass drum in Albert Lea, Minnesota. She stayed, while the men went off to World War II, and she played the bass drum in an all-female band and reveled in her independence. She rolled her light brown tresses around juice cans and clipped them with clothespins to achieve a perfect chignon, and she kept the bed-space empty beside her until she was nearly thirty and was fine with that. Compared to many of my hometown classmates, my marriage at age twenty-five was a late one; had I been single any longer, I could have been classified as a "spinster" in their eyes. Those I used to know deemed my independence weakness and my self-reliance a sad necessity until I found a man to do things for me.

Grandma Lucy wore stiff, gray suits when she played the bass drum and I wondered how conducive this tight fabric was to beating mallets against taut sheepskin. She had well-defined, sinewy knitters' arms that churned as she moved them, even as she lay dying from ameotrophic lateral sclerosis. That's Lou Gehrig's disease, for most people. Her name was Lucille Dagmar Holmgren Voltz Ingebrigtsen; she was Danish and Swedish and her mother was a teenage bride. It was more important to me that she died than some sports fellow.

In Manhattan in the late-1930s, she carted rich women's children to carriage rides in Central Park and ballet lessons on the Upper East Side. Changing diapers was less appealing than spreading manure in a garden, but she saved money and sent some home to her West Denmark family. Families like the one for whom she nannied requested Midwestern Scandinavian girls for their beauty and brawn, as well as farm-forged work skills. With Grandma Lucy, they also got a quick tongue and sharp wit with mad sewing skills. She spent five years there, in the mid-to-late 1930s, and then went to work for Anchor Insurance Company.

According to my mother, Grandma Lucy’s mother (Anna Holmgren) was just like Lucy. She, too, was mouthy and wise, quick about the house and all-knowing about the family. When she grew old, and a bit senile, she began to lie. She told everyone that she had a boyfriend who was a doctor (in fact, who was her doctor, whom my mother and Grandma Lucy had met) and who bought her things like fabulous gowns, hats and ruby rings. In fact, Anna was buying these gifts for herself. When she died, they were found hung, unworn in her bedroom closet. Multiple hats came careening from shelves above, their price-tags attached.

Anna was predominantly a farm wife, which means more than a kitchen-dweller. Like immigrants before her (and her daughter, Lucy, after her), she shared equally in farm production—helping with livestock, feeding and tending them, and harvesting crops in the autumn. She and her husband, my great-grandfather Carl-Erik, did well as farmers and got along splendidly. They joked and fought in a healthy way, and while she did most of the domestic activities, Carl-Erik knew how to cook and undertook the job when Anna was not up to it, or in the mood for it. All of their children helped in cleaning their home.

Anna knitted and crocheted, and not only passed on her creations (in doily form), but also her abilities to Grandma Lucy. My mother learned these arts once, and though she no longer engages in them, has passed the interest on to me. I knit, and invite friends to learn the same art so that we may gather in klatches and discuss our lives.

I write this about my family because I am my family, an amalgamation of their dreams, hopes, desires and talents. I write this for its women because I do not wish to lose their stories. Until I prodded Grandma, aunts and Mother, their stories trickled forth unpredictably—at family ham dinners or birthday parties, while elbow-deep in gravy or splashing detergent on the floor. I saw the strength in their sinewy arms, kneading stuffing into turkeys they had butchered an earlier fall. I saw their courage in tire-changing, sassy comebacks and hearty laughter. Until I delved into their stories, the stories of our shared history, I did not want to be like my mother. Now I wish to embody her characteristics, her mother's characteristics, and those of the countless generations of women before us. I want to know the many "old countries," and become an idealized version of myself--attuned to both the past and present and engaged within writing an ongoing history.

I've tapped into my subjective version of my family’s history. What I've chosen to present here is not an end, or a beginning, of my lineage. It does not represent a "truth" or a single train of thought. Some of my family’s women have been lost to time; their voices did not emerge from the din of others' own words. Their bodies died and the reverberations of their lives ceased to be noticed. Some of the dead would certainly question their sisters' interpretations of events, just as I question my younger self in my decisions and beliefs. I am not old, but I have insight into the influence of time. When I see the wrinkles form around my eyes, I see my mother.