BIRDIE

“As a girl I often found myself in strange places with her….”

I got this little glass bird with my grandmother Margarethe when I was very young, a souvenir from a trip to Minnesota. As a girl I often found myself in strange places with her: meetings of her doll club, where I might sit in a corner or under the table; antiquarian bookshops with crocodile-head bookends and peacock feather pens; a garage set up for afternoon tea; a mansion where she introduced me like royalty and a crowd applauded. The bird came from the mansion. She probably explained what was happening, but I learned early on to tune out when she spoke.

It's not that I didn't like her—I loved her! She was a very sweet person, and generous to a fault, but when she talked she was impossible, full of endless imperatives and invented claims. Look at this… You should…Why don’t you...? She’d say I made lima beans, your favorite, when you hated limas. She once had my father perform puppetry in front of a famous marionetteer even though he’d never handled puppets! She just optimistically imposed her views and wants on the world, never mind if they had any connection to reality.

She lived in Evanston, Illinois, but grew up on a farm in Minnesota, the oldest of eleven. She once told me that on the farm they used cotton to clean their teeth, but she wasn’t much interested in talking about those days. Her favorite subject—the one she forever returned to—was our Norwegian heritage. Her father had come from the Lofoten Islands, above the Arctic circle, and it was from his ancestors, the Sami people (she always called them Laplanders), that we got our red hair, high cheekbones, and bluish pale skin. These weren’t points of vanity but straight-up tribal identity. And she wanted me to identify, too.

She was obsessed with keeping track of relatives, corresponding with them around the globe. Her trove of family photos would be coming to me, she made it known, when she was gone—as would her vast collection of clippings from the small-town Minnesota paper that chronicled our extended family’s births and baptisms, Little League stats and news of college acceptances. It could not have interested me less.

But my grandmother herself fascinated me! The T-shaped scar on her belly from when my father was born. The red hairpiece she removed at night to set on her dresser. The rust-colored patch on her right shin, damage from the time she was mugged in Chicago. Her cool, damp skin and the way she gripped my fingers, squeezing and resqueezing, when we walked to the El. I was her only grandchild. When I stayed with her she brought me breakfast in bed, orange quarters in a paper towel (she loved paper towels) or strawberries with a ton of sugar. She served me TV dinners and let me eat chocolate frosting with a spoon.

She worked until age 80, in accounting departments and banks, then moved east to join our family. Five happy years later, she died one night after feeling a bit queasy. It was a shock—I’d never known her even to sniffle. I inherited everything: all the letters, clippings, photos. It was overwhelming and I did not, at 20, emerge as a heroic custodian of Norwegian heritage. But it turned out that what she'd tried to instill did take hold. A small yet noisy part of me responds to Thor and Odin, battle axes, sleek sailing ships. And while I was researching old houses recently, photos of Minneapolis's Turnblad Mansion undid something in me.

I remembered with sudden acuity the mansion where she introduced me to a crowd. It came to me: She was announcing my lifetime membership in Vesterheim, the Norwegian heritage museum whose magazine I've been receiving for 50 years. I remembered picking out the bird in the gift shop, being told it was fine craftsmanship, an excellent choice. Not buried memories exactly, but the pieces had never lined up—why we were there, what she wanted. The bird was like a letter waiting to be opened. It tells me my grandmother was playing the long game: betting that even without listening, eventually I’d hear.

—Jennifer Buxton Haupt