Tell Me a Story . . .

“Mom, tell me a story when you were little.”

This is my little girl’s nightly request. I have no idea how somewhere along the line she decided that my childhood was good bedtime fodder. Maybe it’s because of the time I relayed the story of how a tornado once lifted my family home into the mystical land of OZ. (Hey, a person can only tell so many stories about growing up on a cattle ranch before taking liberties with established plot lines. That being said, no comment about the time I woke up to find three bears looming over me while I napped in Baby Bear’s bed.)

I wrestle with her plea and finally settle on one of her all time favorite stories, one she loves more than OZ and bowls of porridge.

In my home office is the wedding picture of my great great grandmother, Minnie Nelson, a brave Danish immigrant who left her family and home in 1906 for the promise called America. And in my living room is her trunk, a modest century old wooden vessel, leather straps still intact, that held all of her material possessions and misty dreams.

A mere six years later, a different wooden box held all those dreams.

A coffin.

Minnie died of an infection shortly after giving birth to her fourth daughter. She’s nothing but a historical statistic on childbirth related deaths in the last century but a vital branch on the tree of our family. The ten-day-old daughter Minnie left behind was too much for her Norwegian husband to handle. The newborn was given up for adoption, disappearing from our family like a gasp.

The oldest of her remaining three little girls, my great grandmother, Agnes, was six years old when she lost her mother. And a mere two years later, she said goodbye to her littlest sister. Her name was Hazel. And she died from pneumonia at the age of four.

Little Hazel still rests in a shaded cemetery next to her young mother. I visit them with my daughters every spring and place fragrant lavendar lilacs on their graves.

And so I tell the story to my little girl again. The story of Minnie. Of the missing baby. Of little Hazel’s death. And of her great grandmother, Agnes, and how all of these women were here before her, and how she is here, because of them.

My little girl knows the rest of the story by heart:

How Agnes grew up and became a well-loved teacher in one-roomed schoolhouses scattered throughout the county. How she married a carpenter named Clarence and had a little girl named Cynthia. How twelve-year-old Cynthia met a boy named Alan one day while visiting her mother's rural school, and how Cynthia thought he was such a repulsive farm boy with cow hair on his hat. And how those two grew up and went to high school together, and how Cynthia must have gotten over the cow hair because she married Alan. And how they named their first born daughter Pam. And how Pam grew up a tomboy but became a beautiful girl in bell bottom jeans only to fall for a rebellious boy from the next town who drove a sports car and liked to laugh. And how Pam married that boy, moved to his family's farm and had a daughter named Audra who spent her childhood playing in the haybales and romping through the prairie with the wind in her hair. And how Audra grew up and had two daughters of her own.

She knows all of it. The story of her. The story of me. The story of Pam, and Cynthia, and Agnes and Minnie.

The story of our family and all of the girls.

When we were little.