Grandmother Emma Sophia Peterson

My grandmother Peterson as I remember her was a small stooped person, much afflicted with osteoporosis. Earlier in her life she had been of moderate height and erect even regal carriage. I think in that respect as I recall the family picture that was taken when aunt Laurine was a babe. My grandmother sat next to her husband and she was clearly a physically attractive woman.



Jonas and Emma Sophia Peterson and children, circa 1905
Back, from left: Laurence, Naomi, Serenus, George, Esther, Carl
Front, from left: Ruth, Jonas, Lillian, Emma and Laurine (on lap), Milton


The impression I have of my grandmother as she lived in the house “on the hill” was this old lady who spent a lot of her time in the kitchen, cooking, baking, doing the dishes. Although aunt Esther, and aunt Ruth were present she always kept to herself the task of washing the dishes. Maybe this was a holdover from the days on the farm when her children were young and she did most of the kitchen chores herself. She always used a very minimum of water either in the dishpan or in the very small pan in which she rinsed the dishes after they were washed. This careful use of water was surely the habit that she had on the farm when transporting the water for the household chores was often the major part of a particular task. I recall her commenting that on the weekly wash day she thought the job was half done when she had carried the needed water from the lower well. A distance of maybe 100 yards.

The cookies she made during most of the year (as differentiated from Christmas time when she made Bakalsar and one other holiday cookie) were always chocolate cookies with chocolate frosting on them. She would keep a store of them in a drawer in the kitchen from which she would dole them out to us children as when we happened to be in the kitchen with her.

I have a most vivid memory of an encounter with my grandmother in that kitchen. The two of us were there just the two of us. Outside there was developing an Iowa thunderstorm of the kind that can come up in the summer time. She turned to me and said quite seriously “That is Thor riding in his chariot.” I was astounded at this bit of Norse lore coming out of this very pious Lutheran woman. It was completely out of character. She must have learned it during her childhood in Sweden. Was it only a story from her childhood or did she still give some credence to this fable? I sometimes wonder.

For she was a very convinced Lutheran to whom the Bible was the very immutable key to the world around her. She was of course well versed in the Swedish language from her childhood and she read the Bible in that language. She did have some quite brief schooling in English after arriving in this country but though she could converse in English I don’t think she could write it. Her strong, almost fundamentalistic Christian belief was a dominating factor, indeed I might say the dominant factor, in the upbringing of her family. None of her children strayed far from the orthodox Lutheran belief, maybe I should say not very fat at all. Three of her sons entered the ministry of the Lutheran church and one of her daughters married a Lutheran minister. I shall discuss them later as I run through the members of the family.

Because of this strong emphasis on adherence to the Lutheran faith and because my grandmother was so disliking of the sexual experience, the ambience in the Peterson household was fertile ground for repressed psychosis and it took the form of half of my grandmother’s children never marrying. The rest were psychological misfits in one way or another. Of the five who did marry, my opinion is that only two — my mother and my uncle Milton — led really normal lives. I have often thought that the history of the Petersons would be an excellent basis for a psychological novel.

One of my cousins, the eldest son of my uncle Milton, got his doctorate in English and was a professor in that field at the University of South Dakota. He wrote several short books that I am sure were based in whole or in part on his observations of the members of the family. When he tried to elicit come information about my uncle George, a particularly likely psychological study, my aunt Laurine clamped down on giving him any information that the family was privy to him. My sister Vivian was aware of this information but she too refused to disclose it and when she died the information was lost forever.

I had at one time several of these books by my cousin, may still have them somewhere. The stories in them are sort of weird. My uncle Milton was married to the youngest of the C.O. Swanson daughters and my friend Howard Nelson’s mother was another of the daughters and it was through him that I was aware of and got these books. Howard and I are not cousins of course but we did have this mutual cousin and it was a tie that helped to tie our lives together. I shall delve further into my thoughts about George when I get to him.

Suffice it to say that my opinion of the Peterson household was like a little community dominated by a rather extreme attachment to the Lutheran interpretation of Christianity, isolated from the world of ideas and information in the universe outside of its tight little boundaries and very distrustful of what these ideas would do to their deeply ingrained convictions. The person who caused this was my grandmother — a sweet and agreeable individual of very appealing and seemingly humble demeanor on the outside but hard as steel on the inside. Although it was my grandfather who managed the economic matters of the household it was my grandmother that set the tenor of the environment.