My spouse, Trella Laughlin, finally entered the list of octogenarians tiptoeing toward the next possible landmark, one year at a time. Her February 21st birthday was a grand event with the household askew, the foodstuff lopsided toward finger food, the dogs miffed because they were not the center of attention, and enough people to start a mini-revolution, all lefties, vocal with songs of solidarity and change and love.
Crocus pushed their purple faces through the grass, daffodils bulged yellow but not quite out, a few yellow sprinkles of forsythia, edges of pink-orange on the quince tree – it was time for a party, time to show appreciation, time to find out how alike we are and how our values have not changed despite the chaos that describes the larger political world. My Trella, a lifetime radical who gives no quarter to lesser political frames yet is appreciated and loved by all (or almost all, as she would insist I say), glowed into the day amid people she has known for decades as well as those she has met this year. It was definitely her party. And me? I loved it.
I appreciate this woman who now joins me in the eighth decade of our lives and I love the life we have somehow been able to create here on Mill Hollow in this small northwest Arkansan town. We have a fine house, a couple of very old vehicles, our much loved animals, some small retirement income, each other, and a diverse community of friends: artists, musicians, gay men, lesbians, UUers, conservative Christians and liberals, all surrounded by dark clouds and political winds that may well disrupt or destroy the last decade my spouse and I can claim with relatively healthy minds and bodies.
I would not trade places with anybody in the “T. Towers” who might very well have the power to disrupt my life while never recognizing that I exist. May I have the stubborn courage of my maternal grandmother, whose story may not even be true.
My grandparents survived the Depression on their North Dakota farm but they could not survive seeing farmers destroying their crops, killing their animals, and pouring their milk products down drains while hungry children watched.
They sold out, sold everything at a loss and returned to a farm in Norway, just about the time the Nazis took over Norway. Their land, in the Finnskogen area, was right on the border of Sweden. It was an excellent location for the Nazis who took the big house and let my grandparents live in the small house.
My grandmother was a midwife-nurse. She helped birth many baby Norwegians in North Dakota and Norway. The Nazi occupation banned her travel and it is from that time that the story of her courage comes.
She grew her garden in Norway to produce as much food as possible, and in her garden she planted an American flag.
The Nazi occupiers threatened her and told her to take it down. “I am an American citizen,” she supposedly said. She kept the flag in place.
She was stubborn and always did what she thought best to do and she had spent a decade in the United States, so maybe she was an American citizen.
Between the two of them – my stubborn grandmother and my firmly radical spouse – I have the imagery and pattern to maintain what I know is true, to act as I know I must act, to say “No” to our current Fascists, just as my grandmother Freida Knudson did in the ‘40s and my beautiful spouse does whenever necessary in this second decade of the 21st century.
Marie Howard