Grandma's House

At my Grandmother’s house at the edge of a small town in Minnesota, a lace cloth was spread on the round oak table on a summer evening. I set the table with flowered China plates for Grandpa and Grandma Kronlokken, plus my parents and their six girls, the littlest a baby. I laid the plates and silverware as Mother had taught me and sneaked the clove-spiced crab apple pickles out of their cut glass dish. I was ten and the table looked festive. It would soon be laden with meat, potatoes and vegetables from the garden.

The small house, which my Grandfather had built himself, fascinated me. When we woke up under the eaves, flowered wallpaper sloped above our heads which rested on starched white pillowcases trimmed with a fall of crocheted lace. Hopping out of bed, we looked down into the big sunny backyard almost completely given over to a vegetable garden. My grandparents grew much of their food. The basement shelves were lined with neat glass jars filled with canned fruits and vegetables, including the aforementioned pickles! The strawberry patch was so large, Grandma often sold berries for pin money. There I learned that the best strawberries were still warm from the sun.

I was the sort of girl who clipped house plans out of the Better Homes and Gardens and other magazines which came to our house, and imagined how my own house would one day be furnished. By my lights, Grandma Kronlokken’s house was old-fashioned. Upstairs was a heavy oak bedstead and vanity in the room where my parents slept. Downstairs, the dining table stood in a corner of the big room, near a wooden cabinet full of glass dishes. A wooden clock with a curved top gave metallic peals on the quarter hour. Quaint ceramic tiles lined the bathroom. Thick rag rugs which Grandma had braided from old woolen dresses and trousers covered the floors of each room, in colors of grey, navy and black. She was 69 and wore little lace-up heels and wrapped her long white braid in a bun at the back of her head.

A snooty little girl with my head full of magazine photos, I vowed that when I became Grandma’s age, I would not have a house full of old-fashioned furniture. I was not going to get old and if I did, I would stay in fashion! What did I know? Looking back now, my grandparents’ house seems to be a masterpiece of a careful, ecological lifestyle with very little waste. 

Born in 1886, Grandmother had been a hired girl, learning housekeeping during the 19th century and practicing thrift throughout the early 20th. My Grandfather owned businesses in their small town, but he was never far off the farm where he grew up with a host of brothers and sisters. Nothing was wasted. When he wanted to scandalize us, my father brought home a jar of pickled pigs’ feet which he ate with relish.

Grandma Kronlokken’s gift to us each Christmas was a box of traditional Norwegian foods she had made: especially klub and lefse. We loved the lefse, a flat bread made without potatoes, spread with butter and sometimes sugar. We all learned to make lefse in the years following. Klub was a sweet-tasting black sausage which was cut in rounds and fried. Our Mother wouldn’t touch it, as she knew it was made from blood and cooked grains. But she did fry it up for us. I spread butter on it, and enjoyed the flecks of fat in it. Dad did make it once or twice after I left home, but procuring and processing the blood wasn’t easy by then. I found the same taste in a black pudding that came with a breakfast at Heathrow airport in London. 

I remember once telling a Norwegian lady I met in Chicago about the lefse and klub we enjoyed as children, thinking to share our backgrounds. She gave me a look of disdain, saying, “But those are the foods of the poor!”

As humans, we are all consumers of goods and services, food and fuel. In 1956 I certainly wasn’t thinking about the need for constraint. The population of our country was approximately half of what it is now. Popular interest in ecology emerged with the environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Before this, two world wars and the Great Depression had taught citizens austerity and conservation. Since then, we have pulled out all the stops, glorying in a robust market economy that pushes most of the heavy and dirty work, as well as our hazardous garbage, off our shores.

Just beyond our own skins are our homes. As thoroughly as our bodies and our clothing reflect our inner lives, so do our houses. I no longer read magazines full of colored photos, so I have lost any sense of “fashion” I once had. (Does it occur outside of glossy magazine photos in any case?) And it is clear that we have come to need restraint and austerity in our life styles. “Live simply,” we are told, “so others may simply live.” 

Luckily, Don and I both appreciate order and simplicity, so that is what our living spaces convey. We like authenticity, so our furniture is wooden, our couch covered in cotton. Our current space is small, but serves many functions. Sometimes all of Don’s camera gear comes out, and the front room becomes a studio! We have no space to garden, but we shop at farmers markets and co-ops, avoiding packaging and plastic.

My cousin Ruth Frost has just published a book titled Homes with Heart [2021] in which she tells many stories about her life with Phyllis Zillhart and their family. “Our homes are the libraries of our lives,” she says, “whose rooms preserve our stories — those that sustain us and those that still haunt us.” She describes ways of creating an ecological home, but also how to make sure it is filled with an atmosphere of love.

The work of my Grandmother’s loving hands and her pride in her four children was everywhere present in her home. My grandparents created their lives from very little and strove to protect and maintain what they had. And I have now grown an understanding which sees the beauty in this.