A couple weeks ago, my Great-Uncle, Art, died of a heart attack due to complications of emphysema. Art became like a grandfather to myself and my little brother after our Grandpa (his brother) died almost twenty years ago. I wasn't able to attend the funeral due to work obligations, so I wrote something for the funeral for my Dad to read. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to read it there, so I decided to post it here so that everyone can know what an amazing person was lost to the world earlier this month.When I first came to South Dakota, not too many years after Grandpa Ole’s death, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit like Captain Kirk beaming onto an alien planet as we drove across the plains toward Art and Eunice’s farmhouse. I’d never been to a place quite like this, where the heat waved the grass, drying to golden in the late August sunshine, bending it toward the ground under a dizzying blue sky. Where stands exploded with the most marvelously sweet watermelon in the world, where people stapled multicolored corn to the sides of auditoriums and where even the gold could be rose and green. I’d never even really been to a farm, just passed by them on my way through southern Minnesota and Iowa to our relatives in Waterloo, so the entire experience was just about as alien to me as Kirk’s encounters with green ladies in skimpy silver dresses.
Rather than encountering a bevy of alien beauties, however, I was introduced to farm life by some alien bovines in the wee hours of my first night when I met a herd of confused cow eyes staring through the darkness toward my window. They stood clustered in the glow of the light on the front lawn, waking me up in the middle of the night with a smattering of misguided moos. This “city girl” had never experienced a surprise quite like that one, a South Dakota welcome delivered by the strays from the neighbor’s escaped herd (though, as I recall, Eunice wasn’t quite as tickled about the trampled grass and fresh fertilizer she found on her lawn the next day). That night, I knew I was in for something better than alien babes are for a virile captain—I was in for an adventure in a new frontier.
Over the next week or so, we followed Art and the rest of the South Dakota Olsons over acres of land, inspecting cows out in the pasture, elbow-deep in various farm engines, trudging through a half-dozen different crops, and even baling hay. By the end of our first trip, Matthew swore up and down he was going to grow up and become a saxophone-playing farmer. I wasn’t quite as interested in getting down and dirty—while I went out on a number of excursions, I was just as content to walk around the property as all the cows charged in the opposite direction, watching as much as possible, playing with Dale’s panting golden lab in the shop and watching as they dismembered various machines, or riding with Art as he drove out to check a fence line, taking notes all the time about what I was experiencing.
Art picked up quickly on exactly what got me interested. One Sunday, after church, he took all of us on a tour of an empty town not far from the property, explaining what had once been there, pointing out everything from the post office to the mercantile. I was transfixed by the stories of the place and the people that had lived there, swept into the tales of a town whose boards were now gray and rotting, overgrown with lush green saplings. When we got home, I wrote pages and pages about the place as quickly as the thoughts could spill out of my brain.
Art and Eunice welcomed our family with such graciousness that Matthew and I quickly became like two more of the grandchildren, and even though we were only in town a couple times a year at most, we joined the brood, tromping through Art and Eunice’s house (being sure to leave our shoes in the entry!) and carrying on with our cousins with each visit as if we had barely been absent. We’d all crowd around the table at lunch time, with chairs being pulled from every corner of the house to accommodate as many bodies as the table could fit (sometimes even spilling over into the living room on really tight days), around a meal so big I thought every day we were there must be some sort of a holiday. But no, I was assured by my cousins, this is what happened pretty much every day at Grandma and Grandpa’s… the family would pile in, shoulder to shoulder, for hamburgers and baked beans, salads and sweet corn, watermelon and fruit salads, topped off with a big glass of milk, and NO COOKIES UNTIL AFTER LUNCH! Then, like a stampede tromping over the horizon, the rush would end as suddenly as it had come, and the house would be thrust into quiet again, at least until four o’clock or so.
I found out quickly that South Dakota wouldn’t remain an alien landscape. The farm became an extension of home, just as Grandma and Grandpa’s place becomes an extension of home for every child lucky enough to have the experience of that kind of love.
Norwegians have a proud history of storytelling, with histories and lineages passed down through epic verse, keeping the family and memory alive. Our ancestors were explorers, conquerors, and settlers, but above all, they were storytellers. Of course now we call our storytelling “bullshitting” (and Olsons are some of the best!), but the essence remains the same. We bring back the dead through our remembrance, giving color to their characters by adding new details to our own memories from stories we may not have known as they’re told to us by others sitting around the fire (or around a living room, or the pieces of a tractor’s starter) about those who’ve passed long ago to more sacred country.
When Art told his stories, people stopped to listen, because he was able to make people that were gone come back to life and laugh around the table all over again. Art brought my Grandpa back to me, telling stories of him that I’d never heard, coaxing additional details out of my Dad as we sat around the table, digesting our meal. These moments and memories are some of my favorites of Art—I don’t remember all the stories, but I’ll never forget about the color and humor with which he illustrated even the most mundane events.
I’d always hoped that Art would be around long enough to see what he’d inadvertently inspired in me. I hoped that I’d be able to lay a completed book, or at least a manuscript, in his hands and show him how his storytelling helped to stoke the fires in me that created the unquenchable desire to get a story onto the page, to pass on my own stories in the same way that I remember adoring his. While he wasn’t able to see the physical result, I hope he knows how much I value the legacy he passed on to me by passing on the love of a good story and in the stories themselves.
