Our house on the Miller place was a good old house. At the entry was a big porch that held, for one thing, the cream separator. That was my job, running the separator. There was a big kitchen-dining room, a living room and master bedroom on the ground floor, two more bedrooms and a large unfinished storage room on the second floor. Mom was proud of her house, loved to polish the hardwood floors. Everything always smelled fresh and clean, especially on Saturday night, because we’d all had our baths and crawled into freshly laundered bedding. We all still remember how the house smelled when Mom took the frozen bedding from the line and hung them on the indoor clothesline to dry. It’s one of the sweetest smells you can imagine.
In winter the house was a snug refuge, blanketed in deep drifts of snow. In the summer it was surrounded by an ocean of wheat fields that undulated rhythmically in the wind. But in the spring it stood bleak and forlorn, surrounded by a sea of mud. And North Dakota mud is different, not the mud typical of the southwest, 50 per cent sand, but the alluvial mud of the prairie, 50 per cent glue; and when it’s as deep as it was in the spring, the slimy, shiny goop would ooze up around your boots creating suction around your foot making walking across the field a tedious chore.
I had been playing with Ben Guessner one day and shortly before sundown I struck out across the field toward home. As I extracted each foot out of the ooze, twisting it just a little to release the suction, I thought of a silly thing my brother had done the winter before. He would poke a stick a few inches into the snow and then pretend that a “Chinaman” was trying to pull it through the earth and pantomime a struggle to get it back. He was cute, but I wasn’t convinced.
Not then. Now in the gathering dusk I thought of the slant-eyed Chinaman pulling at my feet and before long my imagination got away from me. Finally, my terror complete, I stepped out of my boots and scrambled stumbling across the field, praying for Solveig.
When we told her about the boots her shoulders sagged a little more. The muscles around her jaw tensed and she sighed as she reached for her coat and her boots and a lantern, and the three of us struck out across the field. Before long we had located the boots, but while Mom was trying to extract one from the mud, a frog jumped out. Surprised, Mom squealed, lost her balance and fell into the mud, laughing, lying in the mud, laughing, her bright eyes shining in the reflected moonlight.
I think that was the night we carried a bunch of frogs home and learned how when you lay them on the dining room table and tickle their bellies they croak every time.
My mother made everything fun. She’d often say, as we were starting out on an adventure, “It’ll either be a time we’ll never forget, or a time we’ll always remember.” We knew that we were in charge of our own happiness. In every picture of her she’s always laughing and fooling around. She turned every trial into possibilities.
