Emma and the Aase

If you were making a move about sensible, salt-of-the-earth people and called Central Casting and said “Send me an old, stoic, self-sufficient Norwegian bachelor woman who can repair a roof and bake paper-thin sugar cookies all in one day … oh, and also who can terrify her sister’s young grandchildren at night because she looks like a floating Victorian ghost when she leaves her hair down,” you’d promptly have the white-haired, durably assembled Emma Christina Nystrom show up at your door in her homemade plaid cotton house dress.

Emma was my mother’s aunt, but she was always Aunt Emma to everyone from every generation in our family. She was part of a long line of my Norwegian forebears who practically built the entirety of Northeast Iowa, particularly Decorah and the sleepy bedroom-and-once-booming-train-hub community of Calmar just south of it.

My sister and I were kind of scared of Emma when we were kids. She wasn’t terribly demonstrable or huggy, she never told fart jokes, and she was completely deaf, which made it extremely difficult for us as kids to warm up to her.

A true child of the Depression, Emma never wasted a thing. She ate entire apples—even the cores, which kind of grossed us out. She turned her old dresses into quilts and eventually the quilt scraps became painting rags that she washed and reused until they crumbled into nothing.

 
She even darned her stockings and later her pantyhose, which made her look like she had alarmingly dark varicose veins running up and down her legs.

When her parents and grandparents (who only spoke Norwegian) got to the point that they needed constant care, Emma dropped out of business school to care for them and her younger siblings. And she never went back. She also never married, so she lived in Calmar her entire life caring for everyone and eventually for the house that her father had built and various generations of her family had lived in for almost a century.

Now, we Norwegians are of sturdy stock. Emma outlived her siblings and pretty much all her friends, and by the early ‘90s when she had to leave the family home and move into the nearby Aase Haugen Home For Sturdy Norwegians Who Are Finally Starting To Need Constant Care But Who Don’t Want To Burden Their Families, she was also in her 90s.

 
We drove up to Decorah to visit her in The Aase (as the locals and residents called it) as often as we could over the next few years. But her spirits were failing as fast as her body. She complained that all her friends and her entire family but us had died. She complained about the people assigned to her table at dinner time. She complained that she was just tired and was ready to go.

I was recently out of college and finally living in my first house about a mile from my parents. And in 1995 on Christmas Eve Day as we were busy cooking our traditional Norwegian Christmas meal at their house, we got a call from The Aase: Aunt Emma was failing fast and they didn’t expect her to last the night.

So Mom and I got in a car, left all the cooking and baking and table-setting and guest-entertaining to my dad and sister, and made the two-hour drive up to see her as snow gently covered all the Iowa farms and towns in sparkly white.

When we got there, Aunt Emma was in and out of consciousness and looking like she was indeed at death’s door. So we held her hands and adjusted her blankets to make her comfortable and sang Christmas carols with her.

 
At one point, we were finishing what we thought was the final verse of “Silent Night,” but Emma clearly knew the song better than we did because in her fog she barrelled into a final verse we only barely recognized. We did our best to sing along though. But only so she wouldn’t judge us in the afterlife.

As it got late, I realized we had no Christmas Eve dinner for the three of us to enjoy. The Aase’s kitchen had closed, so I jumped in the car and started driving around Decorah (in the prehistoric days before GPS phones and even Mapquest) to find something for us to eat.

You’d think a grocery store in a very Norwegian town would have Norwegian favorites in stock on Christmas Eve, but you’d be wrong. So I had to improvise: pre-packaged cups of Christmas-red Jell-O, Kaiser rolls (because Germany is in Europe so it’s practically the same as Norway) and cold cuts. It wasn’t much, but it would definitely become a memory.

But when I got back and we ate our bountiful feast, Emma started to rally. She was lucid and talking, and she and even the night nurse told us we might as well go home.

So Mom and I got back in the car and drove home through the snow-covered fields and little Iowa towns late on that Christmas Eve. We sang along with a “Messiah“ broadcast we found on the radio and talked about Emma and the end of an era she represented when she eventually dies, and we had a rather lovely time together.

But when we got home, everything was chaos … from a proper-Christmas-decorating perspective, and my sister begged us to never leave her alone with Dad on Christmas Eve again because he set the table like a toddler and made the Christmas trees on the Spode china crooked. CROOKED!

 
The next morning—Christmas Day—as we were finally enjoying our now-leftovers Christmas Eve dinner—ON CORRECTLY ORIENTED PLATES—we got another call from The Aase: Emma had died peacefully in her sleep that morning. And ever since then, her death has always added a poignant side note to our Christmas celebrations. But if you want to be remembered long after you’re gone—especially in a social-media post that gets re-posted every year in perpetuity—I recommend dying on a major family holiday.

Deaths are always sad, but Emma had certainly had a good, long run and we were all ready to let her go. And she was clearly ready to let go herself.

I don’t remember how we learned this next little tidbit because we certainly didn’t have the news on during Christmas, but we eventually found out about someone else who had died that same Christmas Day: Dean Martin. Boozy, handsome, king-of-cool Dean Martin had died on the same Christmas Day as prim, proper, sturdy, Depression-sensible Emma Christina Nystrom.

And as we pondered this odd little coincidence and mourned each person in our separate but very different ways, we all found ourselves asking the same obvious question:

What do you suppose Aunt Emma and Dean Martin are talking about as they wait in line together at the Pearly Gates?

Family: Ruthie Bjonerud

Robert, Edna, Neva and now Ruthie Bjonerud were finally reunited three years ago today on the hereafter family farm, where the pastor at Ruthie’s funeral declared that all the cats are nice.

Ruthie was my mother’s cousin and the undisputed keeper of all the family history and lore on the seven-brother-and-two-sister Bjonerud family tree, the diaspora of which came from across the country to reunite at her funeral—probably for the last time—in our easy, loving, treasured geniality to reminisce about Ruthie and catch up with everyone else in our extended Norwegian family. 

Ruthie had been in deteriorating health and had finally agreed to move into the Aase Haugen Home for Lingering Norwegians, where less than a week later she by all accounts died peacefully in her sleep. It’s all anyone could want as far as a way to go, and in her memory her beloved—but now aging, far-flung and busy with our big-city lives—extended family buried her in the Calmar Lutheran Cemetery family plot among the generations of sturdy Norwegian ancestors whose lives in rural northeast Iowa extend back to America’s Civil War. 

And then we—as did those generations before us—gathered at Calmar Lutheran Church for sandwiches and slices of cake prepared by the church ladies and enjoyed the fellowship of family, old memories, new stories and remembrances of the woman who'd spent her life tirelessly, lovingly chronicling it all for us.

1. I finally ran the Nordic Fest Elveløpet 15K

2. But not really.

3. There were probably 100 15K runners overall.
4. I was clearly dead last of the runners by mile 4.
5. Seriously. Just me and the very lonely road.
6. And the nagging worry that I’d end up running the wrong direction for miles and miles without knowing it.
7. In writing, we call this foreshadowing.
8. So there are lots of hills in Decorah.
9. OH MY ODIN THERE ARE HILLS.
10. But they’re nothing compared to the all-but-literal MOUNTAIN that started about mile 5 1/2.
11. MOU. NTAN.
12. Just hills and hills and trees and the road and me.
13. And at one point two startled deer.
14. Plus my irrational worry that I’d encounter a marauding band of feral gnomes who’d abduct me and I’d never be seen again except for occasional sightings of me in a chin beard and gnomey hat under a bridge.
15. Irrational.
16. Except it WAS Nordic Fest so the gnomes might have been emboldened and hungry.
17. But let’s not think about that.
18. Because there’s no such marauding bands of feral gnomes, right?
19. Anyway ...
20. The mountain kept going up and up and up.
21. And then you’d go around a bend and there’d be even more up.
22. But finally there was a plateau.
23. With a rough-hewn rock that had been mowed around in a figure 8.
24. Again: foreshadowing.
25. So the road started going downhill.
26. Finally.
27. FINALLY.
28. The road eventually came to a fork.
29. The official Elveløpet directional arrow sign that had been stuck in the ground at this fork CLEARLY said to go left.
30. Which felt wrong, but I was so turned around that I had no faith in my sense of direction.
31. Foreshadowing.
32. There’s that word again.
33. So I went left.
34. And the road started getting uphilly again.
35. Let me interrupt this gripping narrative to mention that I’d been maintaining an 11:30 pace through my entire Alpine adventure to this point.
36. I’d expected to run a 12:00 pace, so 11:30 was both an awesome surprise and a genuine motivator to maintain my sprightly clip.
37. Though it was clearly epically slower than the collective pace of the other 99 Elveløpet 15K runners.
38. Because they were so far ahead of me that I was ALL ALONE on this winding, forest-of-trees mountain.
39. That was surely crawling with marauding bands of feral gnomes.
40. But back to our story ...
41. So I’m going up and up the mountain of hills, thinking it’s awfully odd that I’ve run a good two miles almost entirely uphill and it’s already mile 7 and I’d better get downhill soon so I can get all the way back to the finish line, which doesn’t seem at all like it’s only 2 miles away.
42. Oh, yay! I seem to finally reached a plateau.
43. Look at that interesting rough-hewn rock that’s been mowed around in a figure 8.
44. Hey—wait a minute ...
45. FUCK.
46. Yup.
47. That left-pointing arrow just sent me on mile-and-a-half repeat loop.
48. So I am no longer running the 15K course that had been mapped out.
49. So I am officially no longer running the race.
50. And now I’m so behind that the finish line may be dismantled and abandoned by the time I get there.
51. Again with the damn foreshadowing.
52. But at least it’s new and different foreshadowing.
53. In the mean time, I have no other option but to keep running and hoping I circle back to that FUCKING WRONG left arrow and see what happens if I go right.
54. Which I did.
55. Still having no clue if it would get me back on course or get me totally lost.
56. In the land of marauding bands of feral gnomes.
57. It’s amazing what a volatile mix frustration, uncertainty and mounting anger can be when you need extra power to fuel a long run.
58. Long story short: Turning right got me back on track.
59. For a whole mile.
60. Then the arrows just disappeared entirely.
61. But I had no way of knowing that.
62. Until a dude on a bike saw me and told me I’d run way past the turn to the finish line.
63. I had to trudge through a hay field to get to the trail I needed to be on to get back on track.
64. A FUCKING HAY FIELD.
65. By then I’d on-good-faith run 10.3 miles of a 9.3-mile race.
66. I was exhausted.
67. And hot.
68. Because I was finally out in the sun.
69. And pissed.
70. Because through no fault of my own I technically hadn’t run the race I’d been dreaming about running for 20+ years.
71. So FUCK IT.
72. I walked the rest of the way back.
73. Which ended up being a whopping 1.5 miles.
74. Which almost adds up to a 12-mile journey.
75. Remember that foreshadowing about the finish line?
76. Well, it hadn’t been dismantled and abandoned, as I worried it would have been.
77. But it HAD been pulled off the street onto the grass so the street could be reopened to traffic.
78. Some dude was fucking still standing there with a fucking bullhorn and he fucking announced to fucking NOBODY that I crossed the finish line.
79. At this point I was furious.
80. Plus I was far enough from the long-abandoned starting line that I had no idea where I was.
81. But after I finished my Gatorade—I always run with a Gatorade in my hand—and found a bathroom, I calmed down a bit.
82. Because my half-marathon training schedule had me supposed to be running 10 miles this weekend.
83. Which I totally did in today’s 9.3-mile race.
84. And by the transitive power of holy shit when will these hills ever end, that number is more like 13.1.
85. Which—coincidentally—is the exact distance of a half marathon.
86. So I’m totally on track for rocking the half I’m running over Labor Day.
87. Eyes. On. The. Prize.
88. So I’ve decided to look at all of this as I ran the Elveløpet ... plus a lot more.
89. I’m sorry I don’t have an actual finishing time.
90. Because this race was ROUGH and BRUTAL and OTHER ROUGH AND BRUTAL WORDS so it’s totally a one-and-done.
91. But the shirts are awesome.
92. And I know I conquered some killer terrain at a better-than-expected pace for a good 7 miles.
93. Which I’m really thrilled about.
94. And also a little proud of.
95. Plus I rewarded myself with gluttonous amounts of sweet rømmegrøt pudding afterward, which was my only other goal of the trip.
96. Plus the Nordic Fest parade was more delightful and fun and even stirring than I had any idea it would be.
97. I love my cool-fun-proud-and-sometimes-goofy Norwegian heritage.
98. Except for its inability to point simple arrow signs in the right direction.
99. And ALL THOSE HILLS.
100. And it goes without saying its penchant for stirring up marauding bands of feral gnomes.