New Land, New Lives. Janet Elaine Guthrie
we had all the security from her.
Mother raised cows from calves and when they were ready to have their first calf, she sold them, and that was part of her living. She sold butter and milk, and she was the midwife in town. I don’t think she was educated for it, but people thought she was like a doctor. Every child in our town, my mother delivered. And then, when they got older, she took them home and taught them kindergarten. When she sat down, she knitted stockings and spun wool and linen, and she kept the house so nice. She really did work hard and she was in good health. You don’t die from overwork, that’s for sure!
We had a little farm, maybe seven acres. This little place belonged to Saltvik, but it was called Ödkarby. It was a very beautiful place. The woods—fir and pine trees—was right back of the house, and we were close to the water. We walked to the water and swam. Sometimes we went in the morning to take the cows to the pasture, and mother made up a picnic lunch, and we stayed there all day to bring the cows home to be milked in the evening.
We had quite a big lawn and a woodshed and a barn, and we had a little house, not attached to the house but by itself, and there we kept all our food. We didn’t have inside plumbing; we had that outside, too.
I can see it when my eyes are closed, and I dream about it so many times, that I am there, sleeping in the same bedroom where I slept. We had a little round fireplace made out of tiles in the corner of our bedroom. They call it kakelugn. When the tiles got warm, it kept the room warm all night. Every night in the wintertime, about six o’clock, mother made a fire. She said, “Now we’re going to have a little rest and we’re going to sit and enjoy the fire.” We didn’t put the lights on; we just sat there and looked at the fire in the dark. It was so beautiful. My girl friends used to come over and sometimes mother give us something to eat, which we enjoyed very much.
My mother was a beautiful cook and she was a little different than some women around our neighborhood because she had worked in the bakery and helped to make such lovely food there. We had carrot pudding and we had leverlåda, that was made out of ground liver and rice and raisins and then an egg custard on top of it and baked in the oven. It doesn’t sound good, but to us it was very, very good. Then she made meatballs and pork roast and side pork. She always butchered a pig and a calf each fall and that had to be salted, because it wouldn’t keep otherwise, and a brine put over it. And that we lived on the whole winter. She made sausage and head cheese and all kinds of things.
We had not every vegetable that they have nowadays. We had beets and cabbage and carrots and rutabagas and potatoes, and we kept that in the root cellar. It was dug pretty deep down in the dirt and lined with bricks. The walls didn’t come up very far, because it was to keep cool in the summer and not freezing in the winter. There was a roof with shingles on it and you walked down about three or four steps to go down into it. And there we kept our milk and butter in the summer and it kept very nice and cold. It was not so convenient as to open up the refrigerator door, but it worked quite beautifully and we didn’t know anything else, so it wasn’t a hardship for us. Everybody had it that way.
Mother made us children plant the flowers and fix up the flower beds, so she could do the things we couldn’t do. First of all, we had lilacs. And we had calendulas and many different kinds of those blue cornflowers. I can’t think about the irises we had and many other flowers: forget-me-nots, they were so cute, and violets, and lily of the valley. There was flowers all over in the woods, wildflowers. I can’t remember all their names, but they called them vitsippa [wood anemone].
There were very many wild berries—blueberries and lingonberries and a little bit of cranberries. And we had something they called smultron, like small wild strawberries, very, very nice. Mother made jam out of them and also out of the lingonberries.
Mother made a liniment out of turpentine. There were some other ingredients in it, ammonia and cream. We had to shake the bottle every time we used it, because the cream separated; but it didn’t curdle or anything, it was very creamy and nice, and that we used whenever we got a pain. It was just marvelous. Then she also made black currant juice and kept that all winter. She heated it and give it to us and that was good for colds and croups. Then she used to make chamomile tea for us to drink when we had bad colds. We never knew what any real medicine was; we never had an aspirin in the house or anything like that. I never had been to a doctor all the time I was home. I was nineteen when I came over to America and I had to have an examination. The doctor said, “You are very healthy. Here, go. You can take off any day.”
Christmas was so beautiful at home and we had Christmas for twenty days. Every neighbor had a party. And we had our Christmas tree that we cut down from the woods, snow up to the waistline. We shook the snow out. We had a veranda that went across the whole house and mother used to keep it there and put paper under it so it wouldn’t ruin the floor. Then when it was dry enough, we took it in and the whole house smelled from the fir. We didn’t have any bought decorations. We made stars out of paper and little baskets of paper that were woven—slips of different kinds of paper, blue and green and red and all kinds—with a handle on it. Then we put a little candy or raisins or prunes in it, so the day the tree was taken down we could eat all those goodies. There were strips of colored paper that we made a garland out of and put around the tree. It was very cute when we got done with it. We had candleholders on the branches and we stuck candles in there, and we never had an accident or anything with the candles burning.
The first of May we had really big, big fires. We used to go up on the mountain and build the fires and then we could see all over town and all the church steeples. The mountain was not far from our house. We used to climb up there and make the fires and we used to sing, “Idag det första maj, maj, maj; idag det första maj,” today is the first of May.
Midsummer was also one of the highlights in our lives. They cut down birches and decorated the outside of the house with birch trees. Just at that time, the birch leaves were all out and they were so pretty. Some people even made a little house with just birches all around it and then the entrance to go in; and there was a little table and you could go in there and have your coffee.
They did have a lot of superstition there, and when I was a child I really was scared. We had a woodshed and they said some lady—I don’t know if she lived in our house or what—was there chopping wood and she had been dead for years and years and years. It took me a long time before I could go out to the woodshed and get wood without being scared. And then we had some hills to go up on the road, and they always said that there was somebody on the hill. And that scared me, too, because I had to go up that hill when I walked from the minister. I hoped that, my goodness, nobody is coming that I would be scared of!
I went to school about six years. You went longer if you wanted to go to another school, but I didn’t do it, because I was more for the domestic. I liked cooking, sewing, embroidery, weaving, and all those kind of things. So I quit at fourteen and went to confirmation class. I had to go away; it was too far to walk from our house to the parsonage where they had class. Another girl friend and I lived in a little house with a lady. We took food with us from home and the lady helped us cook it. We went a long time, too; it isn’t like here. We started in the fall and went the whole school year to confirmation class. We had two pastors, one was for the catechism and the other was for the Bible history.
I stayed home for a while and then I had a very good friend that wanted me to come to Stockholm. So I was there a year. I worked for a captain’s widow. She had fixed up her house for a guest house. She had seven or eight people living there at a time. They called it a private hotel, but we served just coffee and coffee bread and cakes for breakfast. I worked hard there and she didn’t give me enough food either. I was very homesick, but I didn’t want to let them know I was homesick at home, so I stuck it out a year.
Then I was home for a while and helped mother and then I started working for a minister. I did a lot of little things. I knitted stockings and took care of the plants and got the wood in from the woodshed. We had to have fires in all the fireplaces every morning and that was my job. I stayed there until I went to America [1922].
I didn’t really decide; it just came on me all of a sudden. My friend Edith said she was going to America and I thought I would go, too. She said, “Come