Emma Sophia

My grandmother as I knew her was, physically a small, stooped old lady, doubtless suffering from osteoporosis. Her most prepossessing feature was her face and head which was quite beautiful even at her advanced age. Her forehead was high and this aspect of her was enhanced by the way she wore her hair, drawn back from her face. Actually there is not much resemblance from the way she appeared as a middle-aged person (from pictures of her) or as I knew her in later life as compared to the teenage adolescent she was at the time of her marriage.



Undated portrait of Emma, probably around 50 years of age

Her hands were gnarled from the years of household toil throughout her life. She was a soft-spoken person with a placid exterior, but underneath she was a person of strongly held beliefs and opinions and was quite determine in achieving her objectives. Perhaps most strongly held were her religious beliefs. In a way I think these were a defense mechanism against the rigors of her early married life on the farm and the vicissitudes of child-bearing and the sexuality of her husband. I don’t think it was specifically the result of her early religious instruction either in Sweden or in this country — her contemporaries in the community and amongst her relatives reacted in a variety of ways all the way from a commitment such as she had to a pro forma acceptance of such people as my as my uncle Reuben and aunt Agnes to a more or less skeptical toleration.

I think she transmitted her negative attitude on sex to her children, although several escaped in part from this influence (my mother, uncle Milton and aunt Lillian). Although uncle Serenus married he had only one child and I surmise the reason there were not more was abstinence from sex for a number of reasons.

My grandmother certainly transmitted her religious convictions to all of her children and some of them were I think rather extremely fundamentalistic (the most tolerant were I suspect my mother and uncle Milton — both because of the kind of marriages they had and exposure to influences outside the nuclear family). My mother, for example, was mildly uneasy with such subjects as evolution but she did not regard it as the anathema that uncle Carl, aunt Esther, aunt Ruth or aunt Laurine would had regarded it (in my opinion of their beliefs).

At the same time there were hidden of seldom-glimpsed aspects of my grandmother that were probably at odds with her simplistic Christian beliefs. One incident stands out vividly in my remembrance. For some reason I was in the kitchen of her home in Gowrie and she and I were the only persons present. There was an Iowa thunderstorm in progress and after a loud thunderclap she turned to me and remarked quite seriously that that was Thor riding in his chariot. Was her remark just a superficial repetition of a folk-tale from her childhood in Sweden? Or had there been transmitted to her some deep-down elements of the long-ago Scandinavian lore and religious beliefs? I wonder. Even when she was a child in Sweden the country had been Christian for a very long time. For her to have made such a remark, totally at odds with her usual character, has always been a source of amazement to me.

Her life in Gowrie was simple, uneventful, a regular and repeated occurrence of everyday, every week and annual events in regular order. She mostly ran the household — aunt Esther and aunt Ruth participated but my grandmother was tacitly in charge. Certain things she always did — such as doing the dishes after a meal. Other could wipe the dishes but she did the washing. Probably as a carryover from her days on the farm when getting the water itself was a major task, she would wash the dishes with only a couple of inches of water in the dishpan. Perhaps it was hot water as much as the water itself that was at a premium.

The Sunday dinner was masterminded by her — we were quite often there for this meal, after the conclusion of the church service. Almost invariably there would be some sort of pot roast and mashed potatoes and gravy. Generally when we were there for dinner we would stay for a visit in the afternoon, followed by an early supper at 4 or 5 o’clock. This would put the dinner time (which was always on the late side because the church service would not be over until 12:15 or so) and the afternoon meal fairly close together.

She always attended church, morning and evening (as long as the latter was continued) and I suppose such activities as the Ladies Aid and the Women’s Missionary Society. Since her household expenses were low she had enough income to make rather substantial contributions to her favorite church activities.

She liked to work in the garden, growing both flowers and vegetables. She baked wonderful apple pies with about as tender a crust as I have ever encountered. The cookies she made were limited to a few recipes but there was almost always a supply of her chocolate cookies (with chocolate frosting) on hand. I can see her still going to the cupboard where she kept them and supplying me or a group of us with this goodie. She also made sort of a rolled cookie (like a jelly roll that was sliced in two before it was cooked) and a cookie which was draped over a cylinder (like a rolling pin) during the baking process. And of course at Christmas time she made the Swedish bakalsar which I liked then and even more so now on the occasions when Jean has made them. They are particularly good when served hot.

Another Swedish recipe was krupkocher (sp?) which was a thick potato pancake with little bits of salt pork in them (maybe she used bacon in her later years). These were seldom served at the meals that I participated in but I was certainly aware of their existence. And at Christmas time there would be gryn, lutefisk, a cinnamon-rice dish and sylta which was sort of a head cheese. The lutefisk and sylta were low in my estimation but the gryn I liked and still do.

She carried on a voluminous correspondence with those of her children who lived away from Gowrie — all in Swedish. She had had some schooling in English but very slight and rarely wrote anything in it. She spoke English but with her children her conversation was mostly Swedish, particularly in the absence of non-Swedish speakers, like her grandchildren. As long as she was capable she made shopping trips to the grocery store and she would go to the post office for mail delivery, etc. but it was a rare and unusual event when she would exceed this limited ambit, even to visit the farm when we were living there.

I visualize her life and outlook from the time when she moved to the house in town as almost totally limited in outlook to church, family and a few particular friends. She certainly read her Bible, but except for the letters she received I suspect she read little else. For most of her life, perhaps all of it, there wasn’t a radio in the house, she never saw a movie or went to the circus, rarely went on picnics — an intelligent, likable but subtly dominating figure whose personality and outlook had been shaped by the limitations of her environment.