Clara's Skates

These are the ice skates my great grandmother Clara brought to this country from Sweden. I imagine her packing her trunk on the home place in western Sweden, her parents brokenhearted at her departure to another world, knowing they would probably never see her face again...perhaps with blessings, perhaps with severe Scandinavian imprecations not to give herself to such an impulsive scheme...what does one pack in her trunk in such a moment? What does one take along from a life she will never touch again? What are the seeds one brings along to plant in a new world where magical soil might allow anything to grow? We know she packed these old skates, marked with the W for Wennerstein, her maiden name. And she made room for the great lines of sleigh bells, spherical brass units of graduating sizes affixed to long leather straps, the largest a couple of inches across and singing rich deep tones below the cheerful chirping of the smaller bells...it was a heavy musical load which must have generated a muffled jingling all the way from that Swedish farm to the untamed prairies of western Iowa. And she must have brought lace curtains - the same curtains she lost when the grasshoppers swarmed across the land. Stories telling us about the plagues of locusts also tell us about the lace hung across the window, and perhaps just a little about the hand which hung it.