Over the past many weeks, I've been working bit by bit to sort out the stuff in my house and pack some things up for my children, grandchildren, friends, and charity donations. I don't have a lot of physical stamina, but there's no big rush. "The moon goes over the village slowly, but it goes over the village." A few minutes here and there is fine.
I have this dresser that my great-grandfather built almost a hundred years ago for my grandmother's marriage. It's a very simple and practical dresser but obviously made with love. It's put together so well -- without nails, except for when it came to attaching a carved mirror frame holding the filmy oval mirror that graces the top of the dresser in a way that makes so much sense when you know my great-grandfather. He was not an ornate man and he clearly wasn't intended to be a decorative artist, but this frame sings of achingly felt love and hope and blessings for a beautiful life for his oldest daughter Dagny.
So you might think it's crass that this dresser has become my t-shirt drawer. I've felt a little guilty sometimes relegating it to that purpose. But as I've been cleaning it out and sorting out the t-shirts I've collected over the years, I am reminded of why I chose this piece of furniture to hold the cottony mementos of my life's little efforts.
My great-grandfather grew up in Norway. In the late 1800s, when the United States was settling the prairie states of the Midwest, Peter Sorenson accepted an loan from a farm family in South Dakota to buy passage on a ship to the United States. But he had heard about how difficult it was for other immigrants who worked on the prairie farms to repay these passage loans, so he struck a deal with a ship's captain to keep most of his cash and work his way across the Atlantic, thus being in a position to pay off his passage loan more quickly.
Once he made it to eastern South Dakota, he used a little more of his passage loan to buy some farm tools of his own. He worked by day on the farm of the family that brought him over, and in the evenings he hired himself out to other farmers.
When the time came that he was able to pay off the balance of the passage loan, he continued his evening hired-hand work and took a job maintaining a couple one-room schoolhouses in and around Toronto, South Dakota. In lieu of full pay, he asked to be allowed to study with the children in the schoolhouses so that he could learn English.
Peter was a God-fearing man and had long been known as a gentle minister, a good steward of his Lutheran faith. At some point along the way, a local family saw in Peter a good husband for their young daughter, Thalia, and a marriage was arranged. She was less than half his age when they married, but she was a remarkable young woman who was already known in her youth as a wise farm daughter and a devout student of prayer and The Book. She was still learning English herself but was a meticulously coherent writer in both Norwegian and English, as evidenced by letters found in a South Dakota barn in the 1980s. Letters from her teen years show a confident young woman who cared deeply about the pain and struggle of the immigrant families who settled the stern prairie lands of the area.
In one letter written to the family of a friend of hers who died of a sudden illness, she lovingly narrated examples of her friend's courage and kindness, and she thanked the family at length for the navy merino dress they gave to Thalia as they disseminated their beloved daughter's few belongings. Thalia wrote of feeling warmth of the dress as the warm embrace of her friend.
Peter and Thalia embarked upon their life together as full partners. Many times over the years, the two woke in the wee hours of the night to the knocks of neighbors requesting their help with a complicated childbirth; a dying family member who wanted guidance in offering up his or her last prayers; the undertaking assistance of a minister and wife who clearly cared about the spirit, soul, and body of a parishioner. In the harsh prairie winter nights, they worked together to harness the horse to the sleigh, light a lantern, and travel together across the snowy plains to do whatever they could.
My grandmother was oldest of the ten Sorenson children who survived to adulthood. She was a skilled nurse by the time she was 16, and she assisted her father with undertaking services for community members called away to God. She and her mother were gentle but firm midwives, and together they wrote whimsical yet touching poetry about their nursing ministrations even during times of heart-wrenching illness outbreaks.
When I earned my first real paycheck detassling corn across the summered prairie fields of southwestern Minnesota, I bought my grandmother a musical jewelry box. She made sure it came back to me when she passed. It was filled with some of the costume-jewelry pieces I loved to touch and hold as a youngster, and with yellowed scraps of paper cradling some of the lively poetry she and her mother wrote during an outbreak of influenza, when her father's undertaking shop served as a hospital and waystation for sick and dying children.
Morning in our hospital
Is like morning on the farm.
We beat the sun up every day.
Oh, to sleep just one sweet morn!
Wee hours when we're fast asleep
A-dreaming of our home,
A child's cry -- gone all our dreams,
Another day to roam.
Breakfast is just nicely started
When a cough is heard.
We and meal are quickly parted
As one sore pain is cured.
Waking up the sick and sleepy
Is dearly on our list.
They rub their sweet, sleepy eyes
With their little fists.
Wash 'em, scrub 'em, clean 'em proper.
SSE's [soap-suds enemas] and all the rest!
These aggravate the tired sick one,
Even to the best.
Feeding, patting squalling babies
All the livelong day,
Till at length the sun's long set
And cares are packed away.
But, my girlie, do remember:
"As is done to him,
The same is done to Me," He says,
And we are bound to win.
And so that clumsily carved mirror frame that grasps the filmy mirror is a poem of love and wooden flower wishes from a hard-working father who hoped his daughter would see herself as the beautiful soul he saw throughout the sunlit sleigh-bell times and the darker days. His daughter Dagny, whose name I bore as my middle name for the first three years of my life, until my mother changed it to the English equivalent, "Dawn."
Now I unpack the dresser. No poetry treasures tucked inside except for the yellowed newspaper linings that chronicle life in a South Dakota town. The second drawer from the bottom is lined quite practically with a front-page photo of my father hauling in his catch from a long-ago ice-fishing season on the James River. This fragile inked fishing expedition abuts a full-page ad from Humphrey Drugs in nearby Huron, where my grandmother took me to buy a Black Hills gold cross pendant after my catechism. I never saw the need to part these memories, or to take them from their oaken cradle home.
Atop these and each of other yellowed newpaper linings of the other drawers sat t-shirts. Inked cotton treasures that call out memories of their own in no-nonsense Helvetica, Palatino, Garamond fonts: Netroots Nation, YearlyKos, Kerry/Edwards 2004, We Care for the Troops, Suzuki Rock 'N' Roll Marathon, Kiawah Island Marathon, Yes We Can!, McSame 2008, One Voice One Vote, Walk to Cure Diabetes, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Nova Nafaka, Sutra Biti Bolje!, Minnesota Is Growe-ing, Camp Wellstone, Jeg Elsker Du, I Heart Pioneer Village, F*ck Tea! ... A t-shirt from the first 5k I racewalked after getting a standing ovation from my oncologist's staff when news of my first normal blood count in eight years came back from the lab. Another from the San Diego Naval Hospital, where my granddaughter was born and where her mother was later treated for grave injuries she sustained in a rescue operation at sea. Another from the staff at Kosevo Bolnica hospital in Sarajevo, where I scrubbed floors and moved patients a few couple ago alongside a former Olympics Committee member who was a nursing faculty member throughout the four-year-long siege that turned Sarajevo's Olympic Stadium into the only safe place where they could bury the bodies of those killed by the daily shellings.
Each drawer is a cotton, wood, and paper palimpsest of my life, my heritage, the legacy handed me to wear forward to the next place.
It's just an old brown dresser full of yellowed newsprint and t-shirts. Plain, ordinary t-shirts.
So why is it taking me so long to finish this work, and why am I weeping?