Today, I thought about my grandparents. They left us in 1984 and 1985, to go wherever it is that souls go. Their bodies lie under a stone in an Edmonds Cemetery; under a stone with a carving of Mount Rainier.

My grandfather, Sven Algot Svensson, came from Sweden to America on his 16th birthday, March 7, 1910. He was accompanied by his older brother Axel Nordell, Axel's wife Jenny, and a child they had adopted while still in Sweden.

My grandmother, Else Mathilde Berg, came from northern Norway through Halifax, Nova Scotia several years later, and ended up in Richmond Beach, WA, living with her sister.



My grandparents met in Edmonds, after the shake mills closed and my grandfather and his family moved down off Mt. Rainier and into town. He drove a bus for the Suburban Transit System, and she took the bus to work as a maid for a doctor in Laurelhurst. They could understand each other. They were both much older newlyweds than they would have been back at home in the old country.

Now that I am an adult, I can see that their lives were as full of upheaval as anyone's. I certainly can't imagine leaving everything behind, fracturing my family if even for a time, to hopefully make a new life in the new world. They were brave, and desperate, and stalwart, and earnest.

As a child, all I saw was the permanence of them. Grandma and Grandpa had been alive for a really long time, and would stay that way. I knew their histories, but to me they were fixed. Now we were all here in Edmonds. This was our place. This defined our family, and here we would stay.

I would always know where to get my keys made (Dave Crow's hardware store), or which store had the best candy (B&H), or the fastest way down the hill to grandma's and the easiest, if longer, way back up the hill to home.

My mom and dad would live in our new house forever. I would always have a home town to come home to.

After my grandparents passed, within 8 months of each other, the world became nebulous. The context had crumbled and I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do or be. That their passings coincided with my graduation from high school and subsequent, repeated dropping out of what should have been my first year of college might be significant. I hadn't thought of that until just now.

Since 1985, the world has opened itself wider and wider, with the hooks to certainty removed a few at a time. My family, meaning my immediate nuclear family, never felt cohesive. We tried, and we muddled through the way every family does, but it was grandma who seemed to be the focal point, the arbiter of propriety, the baker, the cook, the manager, and the ever gracious hostess. Later I found out that she felt she had been the maid all those years, instead of the lady of the house and that made me incredibly sad. She was an intelligent woman, and capable, relegated to taking care of my dad, my grandfather, and his many brothers. She was not one to be a bad hostess, no matter how unfair the social demands of others.

She doted on us kids, even though she didn't understand half of our snotty attitudes, our running from her kisses once we were too cool. But she loved us, heated our bath towels in the oven, and let us sit on the big red kitchen stool in front of the heat register as our bodies dried. She made us krumkake and svenska pankaker and swedish meatballs and that cool chicken dish she made with rice. Oh, and spritz cookies.

When there was no Christmas at home anymore due to my mother becoming a Jehovah's Witness, Christmas still happened at grandma's. I can still smell the red spicy sparkle candles and in fact I own the hand-blown glass Santa tree topper that was lovingly brought from Norway.

I haven't said much about my grandfather. He's the kind of gruff, stoic man you appreciate as a character, a curmudgeon, and not much while he's alive. He was full of spit and vinegar, and pretty clear that when he died there'd be "peace in the valley", which meant deliverance from the cacophony and hassle of three intelligent, challenging grandchildren. He was a sometimes Technocrat, a frequent spanker, and rigorously suspicious of children.

Anyhow, this whole monologue was triggered by watching my friend's kids at their birthday party today. I felt like Meg Ryan in "When Harry Met Sally", when she says she saw a kid and her father playing I Spy. The little girl said "I spy a family".

Today, I spied a family. And it made me remember the last time I felt like I had one.

Thanks to my grandparents for keeping that family thing going until their last breaths. It made such a difference.