Roots

This is the second home built on the Iowa homestead. Very little English was spoken on this farm during these years. We are Swedish.

My grandfather Oscar was born upstairs in 1889. My mother was born in the same room thirty one years later. The family's dead rested in state here. The telegraph about Carl, killed in France in '45, came up these steps. The harvest crews crowded around the big table and devoured great noontime meals. Diphtheria, Scarlet Fever and influenza passed through these rooms, leaving their scars on the lives they touched. Pancakes, quilts, great literature, nature's mysterious beauty and power, backbreaking work, ingenuity and invention, family devotion, genuine piety, laughter, love and indescribable grief...these are the echos sounding through these rooms.

Katie is sleeping in the birthing room. I am in the room my mother decorated in organza once upon a time. The boys are crowded into the room where old Grandmother Jacobs painted away her final years. I may have it mixed up; it doesn't matter. I am here to learn. I am here to be born.