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At Year's End, 2011

At Year's End, 2011:  Hello!

Mari and I went to Lake Mills, Iowa, this summer, to gather around the stone where Peder Heltne lies.  The family came to remember how they had scattered, or taken new names, and to compare variations of the same story.  They stood and talked to each other, and realized that everyone was as much family as everyone else; that wherever the wind had or had not taken them, they had come from this place.  They were dandelion seeds.

Outside of town, huge wind generators gathered on the ridges, like fields of dandelions, catching the wind.

We tell family stories.  Almost always, they are about parents, and grandparents, children and grandchildren.  They are about what we always ate on holidays, and the uncles on the Fourth of July.  They are about aprons, and buggies, and car trips, and how we all came to blow in the wind.

But families are not just about cousins and aunts and potato salad.  Families are also where strangers come together.  At the heart of families are the strangers who marry.  The wind does not just blow out from Lake Mills.  The wind comes from somewhere, too.

I am one of the people who blew in.  "Where did he come from?" "He came from out west, I guess."

He did.  He came from such a family, himself.  Once, it had seemed like we were all alike; Norwegian immigrants, and the children they made.  It had seemed to us, as it seemed to Heltnes in Iowa, that we had a common rootedness.  Ours was more Jacobson and Olson than Heltne and Ellertson, and there were fir trees, not corn fields, around our marker stones, but we had markers, too.  We, too, forgot that there were strangers at the center, and at the edges.

Human beings have been catching the wind, almost forever.  We have walked, and sailed, and soared on the wind.  Everywhere you look, there are strangers coming over the horizon, and they are us.  They become family.

In our family, there are not only Heltnes and Jacobsons, downwind.  There is Michael from Thailand, and Marcia from Africa by way of Guyana, and Minkes from Toledo, and Weises and Hubbards and Los Huertoses, and Nichols, and probably some secrets.  What is most striking is the whole human race, in family.

We expect that now.  It is better now.




conrad.royksund@gmail.com
mari.heltne@gmail.com
www.smokesound.blogspot.com

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