A Plea for Eros

separateness is obvious. In the real lives of real people, this distance may be exaggerated or diminished. A lot of children of my generation grew up with more or less absent fathers. I didn’t. My father was very much
there
in my life and in the lives of my sisters, and like my mother, he was fundamentally shaped by the place where he grew up.
    He was born in a log house in 1922, not far from Cannon Falls, Minnesota. That house burned and the family moved close by, to the house where my grandparents lived throughout my childhood. That house never had plumbing, but there was a pump in the front yard. My sisters and I loved that rusty pump. I remember being so small I had to reach for the handle and then, using both hands and all my weight, I would pull down several times and wait for the gush of water. My father remembers a world of barn raisings, quilting bees, traveling peddlers, square dances, and sleighs pulled by horses. He attended a one-room schoolhouse, all grades together, and he was confirmed in Norwegian at Urland Church—a white wooden church with a steeple that stands at the top of a hill. For me, that church is a sign of proximity. When we reached the church in the family car, it meant we could spot my grandparents’ house. The church was the last landmark in a series of landmarks, to which my sisters and I gave such inventive names as “the big hill.” Every landmark was accompanied by an equally inventive song: “We are going down the big hill. We are going down the big hill.” My parents were subjected to this for years. The trip was about seventeen miles and took about half an hour on the small roads. My sisters and I, like most children, were creatures of repetition and ritual. Places revisited were given a sacred and enchanted quality. I use those words carefully, because there was something liturgical about going over the same ground so many times. The products of both Lutheran Sunday school and fairy tales, we infused the places where we grew up with what we knew best.
    Despite the fact that my parents shared a language, the worlds in which each of them grew up were very different. The Norwegian American immigrant communities formed in the Midwest in the nineteenth century and the country left behind were separated not only by miles but by culture. Those “little Norways” developed very differently from the motherland, even linguistically. The dialects people brought with them took another course on the prairie. English words with no Norwegian equivalents were brought into spoken Norwegian and given gender. Norwegians who visited relations who had lived in America for several generations were surprised by their antiquated diction and grammar. The legacy of home-steading, of primitive life on the prairie, along with the real distance from the country of origin, kept the nineteenth century alive longer in America than in many parts of Norway.
    My grandparents’ small farm, reduced to twenty acres in my lifetime, was our playground, but even as a child I sensed the weight of the past, not only on that property, which was no longer farmed, but in the community as a whole. I lived to see it vanish. The old people are dead. Many of the little farms have been sold and bought up by agribusinesses, and when you walk into a store or visit a neighbor, people don’t speak Norwegian anymore. When my grandmother died, at ninety-eight, my father spoke at her funeral. He called her “the last pioneer.” My father shuns all forms of cliche and false sentiment. He meant it. She was among the very last of the people who remembered life on the prairie. My paternal grandmother, a feisty, outspoken, not entirely rational woman, especially when it came to politics, banks, and social issues, could tell a good story. She had a swift and lean approach to narrative that nevertheless included the apt, particular detail. I often wish now I had recorded these stories on tape. When she was six years old, Matilda Underdahl lost her mother. The story, which became myth in our family, is this: When the local pastor told Tilly her mother’s death was “God’s will,” she stamped her foot and screamed, “No, it’s not!” My grandmother retained a suspicion of religious pieties all her life. She remembered the polio epidemic that killed many people she knew, and in a brief but vivid story, she made it real for me. She was sitting with her father at a window, watching two coffins being carried out of a