Damn Hard Work

I’d worked three days, writing the essay. Three days of reflection on the ways in which the people in this family picture had shaped me. Yesterday, I shared the draft with my husband, as I always do—and he basically said (though trying to be kind), “Who cares? So—it’s your family. I can’t see what the point is.” I can’t say that his response surprised me. Bruce is a writer who worked as an editor for a literary journal. He speaks aloud what my own writerly instincts are whispering. “You should write this for the New Yorker,” he said. “That audience.” Well, I figured I should just bury the corpse and be done with it. “Okay,” I said, “I’m going to go out and lie in the street now and wait for a car to run over me.” I was laughing, painfully. He was laughing, having been in the same position many times, and at my hands. It’s morning now, and I know exactly why I’m writing this essay. It’s about family, yes—and, because of what I know about my own family’s history, it’s about immigrants, and poverty, and the damn hard work of building a life—the damn hard work, too, of writing something worth reading.

In the version of the essay that’s now lying on the morgue slab, I was working with “voices” as the organizing concept. The draft opened with a focus on my parents, their voices being the most present and important throughout my life. But I’ve got to flip it all and start with my grandparents, the immigrants. They’re the reason I’m American and not a citizen of Finland. I was born to immigrant Lutheran Finns, on both sides of the family. When it comes to matters of the heart, we are an open and eclectic bunch. Generations later, most of us have joined our lives with partners of other faiths, Christian and not-Christian. We’ve crossed racial lines, cultural lines, welcoming into the family people descended from immigrants from countries that some might think strange, even dangerous.  

I especially love this photograph from Christmas of 1953 because I’m the bump visible in my mother’s otherwise sleek form. I think of this as my first Christmas. I was still protected from the harsher realities of life, but I was hearing the voices of people who would love and care for me and introduce me to the world. I should introduce them. Standing to the rear in the picture is my Uncle Ernie—he’s about sixteen there. The others are Grandpa Waino, Aunt Mildred next to him, then Grandma Hilda, my mother Rauha, and my father Oiva. Ernie is the only one still in this world. He now carries the burden of being our family patriarch. He’s also one of the reasons I went to college and became a teacher, like he did. We were close enough in age for me to watch closely the things he did.

I’ll start, this morning, with Grandma Hilda. Her family had been in the U.S. for some time when she was born. Her grandfather came to the U.S. around 1888 or 1889. He worked in the iron mines and the woods—damn hard work—and was killed in 1896 by a policeman after an argument over a card game that happened in a bar. There’s a lot of confusion and obfuscation about that incident. The one thing that’s clear is that it caused a lot of anger in the Finnish community of my town. I owe my Aunt Mildred hugely, in being able to tell these stories. She was an early proponent of knowing our family history and traveled to Finland in the 1960s to do genealogical research. Her copious notes and writings were shared with the larger family.

The immigrants in my family came with nothing but grit and hope. When Grandma Hilda’s father was sixteen, he joined his father in the U.S., crossing the ocean on a cattle ship and sleeping with the cattle on the upper deck. At the time of Grandma Hilda’s birth, he had a logging contract at a camp in Wisconsin, and she was born in the cabin they lived in there. Hilda had a knack for telling stories and told them often and joyfully. I trace back to her my own love for weaving a story, especially my propensity to verbally, and sometimes literally, “dance and sing” as I tell it. Grandma Hilda used to tell the story of the March night when she was born. It was cold and stormy and windy, and the morning after, the blanket that lay over mother and baby was quilted with snow. The cabin walls were so poorly chinked, wind blew right through them, carrying in the flakes.

Giving birth at a lumber camp—damn hard work.

Like most of the immigrants who settled the mining country of northern Wisconsin and the U.P. of Michigan, Grandma Hilda was a pioneer. One of the stories she would tell always unsettled me. She and Grandpa lived for two years in a small cabin while they were clearing the cut-over land they’d purchased so they could start a farm. (More damn hard work.)

That particular story so unnerved me, I pulled it out of my memory as I was working on my novel, A Notion of Pelicans, and made it part of the life story of a character named Lavinia. The back story is that it’s the late 1800s, and Lavinia is sitting on a fallen cedar tree, looking out over Lake Superior and waiting for her husband Henry, who is walking their newly purchased acreage. Both of them carry guns for protection from wild animals. Sitting there, Lavinia remembers a day from early in her marriage. I’m sharing the excerpt below. Starting at the mention of “morning bacon,” it’s exactly the story Grandma Hilda used to tell us about what happened at their cabin:

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            “Lavinia, too, carried a firearm. She glanced at the long barrel next to her, leaning against the cedar, and the earthy scents of the clearing were cut through by the smell of morning bacon in the pan, of wood smoke and the faint odors of snow melt and first green shoots outside the open cabin door. They were smells from the first spring of her marriage. She’d been at the stove, turning bacon, when her ear caught a vibration. She glanced at Henry, who looked up from the table. Their eyes locked, and the vibration became sound, the heavy gallop of something winter-starved, drawn down the hill path to the meat curling and snapping in her pan. She watched Henry’s slow leap for the gun where it stood against the wall an arm’s reach from the bed, heard the gun’s roar, felt her nostrils sear with hot powder, and then, the heavy stench of the bear as it thudded across the threshold. Blood ran swoosh rush swoosh in her ears.”

****

I cannot walk the woods of our family farm, the farm where the photograph was taken, without remembering that winter-starved bear and how close it came to charging through the open door to find breakfast in the cabin. It was Grandpa Waino who jumped for his gun and shot it. I suppose there was some element of terrified voices involved in that moment, but it was the act of jumping and firing that mattered. If Grandpa hadn’t reached the gun in time, Grandma would have never told the story, and there wouldn’t have been Christmas 1953, celebrated by the people in the photograph. My grandmother would likely have been killed—and my mother and I never born.

Grandpa Waino shaped me quietly. He was a centering presence. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1910 and, like most in our area, worked in the mines and then for lumber outfits. In World War I, he fought for the U.S., earning his citizenship by driving a caisson that carried ammunition. I can only imagine the damn hard work that was. The experience of the war was so horrible, he wouldn’t talk about it. He’d been mustard-gassed on the battlefield and was left with his body chemistry severely altered. My mother told me that any amount of alcohol affected him as if he’d drunk all night.

My Grandpa Waino was given an opportunity to earn his citizenship—a privilege not shared by today’s hopeful newcomers. It makes me sad and angry when people speak cruelly about immigrants. I feel like an immigrant still, myself, because I know the stories of the ones in my family who had to “break in” to a new place, a new culture. It’s damn hard to start over. Grandpa Waino paid a personal price for his new country. Knowing that, knowing him, taught me the honor of doing the hard thing.

And then there are my parents, Oiva and Rauha.

Despite their Finnish names, and the fact that they learned English only after they’d started school, they were fully American. Oiva grew up milking cows and roaming the woods. As a young man, he worked in logging. Later, during World War II, he served as an airplane mechanic in the South Pacific. Some of his belongings got left at his parents’ farm after he married my mother, and my cousin Laura found one of Mom’s early love letters to him in an upstairs closet. It had been waiting to be discovered for a very long time. Laura sent the letter to me, and I unfolded it to discover the sweet story of my parents’ courtship.

They’d had some sort of fight. Mom wrote, with a tinge of desperation, “I hope you don’t change your mind about us. It would be pretty hard to forget now.” She was about to graduate from high school and was thinking about her life. “Whatever I do,” she wrote, “you’ll have to come with me. If I marry you, I won’t let you work in the mine.” She ended by saying, “Although, if there is no other way out, I suppose you’ll have to.”

The irony is that as children of immigrant farmers, they had little money and little recourse. Oiva continued to work in the iron mines and, not long after he and my mother had married, survived a deadly cave-in. A roof timber wedged against the wall and kept the massive slab from crushing him. He escaped with only cuts and bruises. Mining is boom or bust, and in the early 1960s, the mine closed. Until my parents decided, years later, that Dad needed to make an hour-long commute to a copper mine, there was little else for him to do but work as a poorly paid laborer.

Sometime during those years, my grade school years, I was invited to a special dinner for children—it might have been at Christmas—children chosen from the various schools in town. I was paired with the manager of a local business. He came to our house to pick me up. I still remember the large, beautifully-lit dining room, the buzz and excitement that filled the room. I expected I’d been invited to the dinner because I was a good student. Imagine my surprise when I learned eventually that I was there because I was from a family of limited means. My parents were so skilled at making a good life, independent of their bankbook, I hadn’t known we were poor. I think of Rauha and Oiva today as miracle workers. They taught me economy and gratitude for what I have, and—more by example than instruction—gifted me with immunity to the worship of money and the desire to hoard it. Given the deep divisions and financial inequity that surround us, this Christmas 2025, it’s a lesson I wish were more universally appreciated.

My family around that Christmas tree of 1953 gave their young ones a very great gift. They taught us to value the life of the mind—Mildred, of course, with her work with genealogy, and Ernie with his choice of occupation and public service. Two of his brothers also grew up to be educators. Their combined example played a large part in my choice of teaching as a career. After Ernie’s brother Bill died, he edited a book of Bill’s writings grounded in our Finnish heritage. Even today, our family remains strongly Finnish in our hearts.

As for Rauha and Oiva, they kept books in the house. We were rich with them—all of us were readers, including my pick-and-shovel wielding father. If I close my eyes, I can still hear my mother’s voice, reading poems to my younger brother and me from A Child’s Garden of Verses. Never mind the scarcity of money in our house during the early years—we kids had library cards at the local Carnegie Library and knew the stacks well. We saved for books as we could—then shared them.

It was a family thing. I remember vividly when Mildred’s daughter Mary told me during a visit, all the way from Illinois, that I had to read a spooky, beautiful book titled Wuthering Heights. She was right—I’ve read it many times since! Even Grandma Hilda loved the sharing. She was always giving me books, especially books about or by immigrants from the Nordic countries. The theme stood out—the damn hard work of those immigrant lives both troubled and inspired us. Grandma Hilda had dropped out of school in eighth grade, when her mother became ill and she had to take over household tasks and care for their livestock. You wouldn’t have known it, though, talking to her. Rauha, Oiva, and Hilda taught me love of ideas, the power of a voice rising off a page.

I guess it’s time to hold my breath and hand this essay to Bruce, to see what he thinks. It’s damn hard work to be a family of writers. They’re your best friend—your most honest critic.

I couldn’t survive without either.

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