celebrating - 91st birthday

There is a little lady here who has spent most of her life in the USA, now in her old age she is back in her hometown in a rest home

The poor little lady is alone and lonely. She phones my coworker frequently to bemoan her situation. Nobody comes to visit, she doesn't know anyone here anymore and so on. Today is her 91st birthday, so "someone" bought her a potted plant - a Hortensia if you know them.

We walk down the slippery hill from where we stay when we're in town, carrying Hortense in a plastic shopping bag between us. When we arrived to the door of her little apartment there's no answer, from inside the phone is ringing non-stop. Some of us are prone to take a running start in leaps to conclusions, so the nurses were expedited to open the place up, to murmurs of "oh we should have made this visit yesterday after all"

A nurse lady briskly and efficiently scanned the place:

nope, she's not here.

can we leave Hortense here?

yep no problem.

That's taken care of; Ms, Nurse locks the door, and I head down the hall to avoid the inevitable:

are you sure she's not in there?

Huh?

Well, did you check in the bathroom?

I quicken my pace, but Ms. Nurselady, who gets paid for stuff like this, kindly, patiently, in good humor jingles her keys around and opens the door again to look one more time.

By now I'm almost too far down the hall to be polite if anyone wants to catch up and walk with me, so I stop to study a reproduction of a very cool picture, “Brudeferd i Hardanger”. We've already walked down here once today, but now we're doing it again trying to find a little 91 year old lady who's mysteriously disappeared in the rest home.

Oh she's probably playing bingo Ms. Nurse tells us, so we head down to the Bingo Basement, and as we near the basement I see a little figure of a lady walking along pushing her wheeled walker.

I call out her name, she's not deaf, so she turns around to look, trouble is she's nearly blind, so can't really see me and turns away to keep going. We catch up with her at the elevator, and are joyfully received. Inside the elevator we stand and look at each other, and then we look at the floor, as people do in elevators, the door closes, but we don't go anywhere. I decide it's time to push a button, I push “2” for second floor. Our little old lady acquaintance steps into her role as hostess, and scathingly tells me I've pushed the wrong button and gives me a long hard and sharp look. I pretend not to notice, but being thin skinned and nearly 50, the side of my face begins to burn and I have to concentrate to keep it from twisting into an evil grimace.

We slowly walk back down the corridor and finally arrive to her little place again, inside she sees flowers from a relative... "oh no what am I going to do with these? I can't be watering these...I'll just have to take them down to the sitting room.” I comment that she has several flower pots in the windowsill, “oh yeah, they're all synthetic” (I was wondering, but didn't want to be so rude as to go and try to break off a leaf.) In spite of this she seemed pleased to see Hortense, the plant we had with us.

We started to visit with her, and were interrupted by a few lengthy phone calls, nephews calling to wish auntie happy birthday. I had time to type over half of this during one of the calls until my sensible cohort suggested we might as well leave!

We did leave, but after a cup of tea...I think she enjoyed her birthday in spite of herself!

My scanner

If I had a scanner I'd scanner in the morning.
I'd scanner in the evening all over this land.

But to do OCR you need a good picture, otherwise the recognition program takes a Norwegian text and turns it into a prehistoric Cyrillic document. The free google OCR hasn't been trained for Norwegian yet. www.softi.co.uk/freeocr.htm

I have a book about the early dwellers of Volda, Norway; the town my mother came from. As the document is OCR'ed there are a few difficulties because of my primitive scanning techniques. Often I get the error message, "uncertain character", how true. One of the characters from way back had a wife who was blind, seems their one daughter was blind too; anyway he must have gotten fed up with the wife because one day he rowed her out onto a remote point off the coast and just left her there. Lucky she could shout and holler, lucky sound carries well across water. Some kind soul rowed out to rescue her.

Scanning out love between great uncles and their cousins all a-aa-ll over this land.

morfar as a prisoner-of war

My Mother is the guest writer here.
I was only 9 years old that cold, snowy morning in February in 1945. WW II was raging and we were awakened by a loud hammering on the front door. Mother threw her robe on, ran downstairs and opened. And there she stood face to face with a band of Norwegian traitors and German soldiers who said my father was under arrest. They demanded to be let in, but Mother told them that dad was very ill and was unable to get out of bed. They then made their way in and up the stairs to the bedroom where they ordered my dad to get dressed and to come with them. He tried to explain how sick he was, but there was no way around it, he had to come with them.
My baby brother, Arnstein, was asleep in his crib in my parents' room. I and my sister, Mette, 3 years younger than I, were sharing a bed and lay scared stiff while all this was going on. One soldier stuck his head the door and smiled at us, but I whispered to Mette:"Don't smile at him"! He was probably a nice, young boy conscripted to go on that infamous rampage called WW II.
It was the bleakest day. The prisoners were rounded up in the classrooms of a school where they were interrogated and worse. Father never gave us the details. We learned that one could bring food and other necessities to the prisoners, so Mother sent me down to that school with things for my father. Mother had told me to say to the guard:"Essen fur Martin Dahl"
He was marching back and forth and was armed. I told him my errand, he nodded bruskly and let me by. I walked into the courtyard, which was filled with soldiers, handed my bundle to one of them, who took it inside the building. It was very cold, and the soldiers were stomping their feet and moving around to keep warm. I just stood there on the porch, not knowing what to do. One of the prisoners, who later became my math teacher, was led out to me and asked me to go to his wife and fetch some things for him, which I did. After that, I took up my post on the porch of the school again not knowing what else I was supposed to do. One of the officers came over, bent down to me and spoke to me in German very slowly and kindly, gesticulating so I would understand. I just looked at him mutely, not understanding a thing, of course. It started to get dark, and I understood that nothing was going to change, so I started on my way home. Up the hill a ways, I saw an arc of light go up outside the school, and I ran home crying and told my mother they had shot my father. Strangely enough, she took it calmly, as I remember. Later, we heard that it was just some kind of a firework signal.
I remember that Mother's brothers were in the kitchen when I came in the door. They had come to be a support to Mother. She was very agitated--pacing the floor the while. The atmosphere was one of great fear.The next day, the prisoners were stowed down in the hold of a steamboat, men as well as women, with nothing to even sit on, and for hours and hours they sailed out the fjord and over a part of the North Sea to Ålesund. The Germans had taken Aspøy School to use as a prison, so that's where they housed the prisoners. They were issued empty fish dumpling cans to eat out of. They had to wash them in cold water and instead of soap, they had to scrub them clean with sand. Every morning, the prisoners were ordered to start building a pier on the harbor. They had to lift heavy boulders in place, and, of course, this was way too strenuous for my father in his weak condition, so after 14 days he stared to vomit blood on the job. He was then considered useless and was released from captivity. He could barely carry his suitcase and walk, but was determined to make his way to my mother's cousin and her husband's house, who he knew lived on Kirkegata (Church Street). They were very good to him, took him in, and the next day they saw to it that he got on the steamer back to our town, Volda. He was very ill by now, but he had been an active sportsman all his life, so he was loath to get a taxi. Instead, he walked up the long, steep hill to our house bravely carrying his suitcase. And to our great joy, in the door came our dear dad! We ran to him, but he just sank down on a chair in the corner of our dining room so emaciated and pale. This was the first time he didn't lift us up and hold us on his lap.
The doctor said he had pleurisy, but Father couldn't eat the wretched bread that was available; he got a ration of white bread, which he could stomach. But his health got worse and worse; every day, he came home from the bank where he worked, the perspiration pouring down his bald head and face, groaning, all stooped over.
Finally, he was sent to the hospital in Molde: the diagnosis was acute ulcers to the stomach The doctors operated on him under local anesthesia with my father watching the whole procedure in the mirror over his head finding it all very interesting until the anesthesia began to lose its effect. He begged for a new dose, but the doctor said they were almost finished, but no, he had to have more, as he couldn't endure the pain, so they gave him another dose. His stomach had wasted away, so the doctor did a wonderful thing: he took one of the 12 diverticulae and fashioned a new stomach out of that for dad.
Dad came home, he ate tiny, but very frequent meals, his new stomach grew and developed into a perfectly normal stomach, and the day I saw him smoking his pipe and was raking the front yard I knew that now my father was a well man and that that dark chapter of our lives was well behind us. Dad had a wonderful constitution; he didn't have a sick day as far as i remember after that. Unfortunately, he turned blind because of glaucoma the last 5 years of his life, but he lived till he was 87 years and 7 months old. He died in 1987. Too bad he just missed being a great-grandfather; C. was born two mos. after dad passed away.
One more thing here: my sister and I played operating room for a long time after Dad's ordeal. Using a blunt knife, the kind you eat with, one of us would lie on the floor underwent the "procedure" executed, usually by me! Dad sometimes showed us his ferocious scar, and oh, we were awestruck, I assure you!

i“Food for Martin Dahl”

I got tripped up by this...

Lucky you! The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you. This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:

1- I make no guarantees that you will like what I make!

2- What I create will be just for you.

3- It'll be done this year. (might be a little while)

4- You have no clue what it's going to be. It may be a story. It may be poetry or an article on properly cleaning your face before a masque. I may draw or paint something. I may bake you something and mail it to you. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure!

5- I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.The catch? Oh, the catch is that you must repost this on your blog and offer the same to the first 5 people who do the same on your blog.

The first 5 people to do so and leave a comment telling me they did win a FAB-U-LOUS homemade gift by me! Oh, and be sure to post a picture of what you win when you get it!

So....who will be the first 5 people?????

Rednecks in Norway? Happy birthday Sven!!!

We sang this sappy song at the rest home the other evening with the song group that comes, then I found this hilarious clip on utube.
Be sure to sing along!


English lyrics:

Happy childhood memories include mom's cooking pot
It's out in an old field now where only wild flowers grow
It's worn out from the ladle, from rust and wear and tear
But no one can tell stories like this old cooking pot

Moms old cooking pot, mom's old cooking pot
Happy childhood memories include mom's cooking pot.

It's a long long time ago and many years have passed
Mom and dad are passed away, they've entered into rest
But I can still recall today the noise as we all ate
When all of us were satisfied from moms old cooking pot

Moms old cooking pot, mom's old cooking pot
Happy childhood memories include mom's cooking pot.

The old pot could tell us all about our dear old dad
Our dad who in those hard times could fill the kettle up
To feed so many ki-ds in sunshine and in cold
Also him who blessed our food, even poor man's meat

Moms old cooking pot, mom's old cooking pot
Happy childhood memories include mom's cooking pot.

I hear the birds singing like the time when we were kids
And the sky is the same, ever young and blue
But among the bitter memories there is a great joy
For God has planted flowers by moms old cooking pot

GRYTA HENNAR MOR

BLANT LJOSE BARNEMINNE ER GRYTA HENNAR MOR,
HO STÅR PÅ GAMLE TOMTER DER VILLE BLOMAR GROR
HO ER NOK SLITT AV SLEIVA, AV RUST OG TIDAS TANN
MEN INGEN KAN FORTELJA SOM GAMLE GRYTA KAN

GRYTA HENNAR MOR
BLANT LJOSE BARNEMINNE ER
GRYTA HENNAR MOR

NO ER DET LENGE SIDAN, OG MANGE ÅR HAR GÅTT
FAR OG MOR ER BORTE, SI KVILA HAR DE FÅTT
MEN ENDÅ KAN EG HØYRA STÅKET KRING VÅRT BORD
DÅ ALLE SKULLE METTAST AV GRYTA HENNAR MOR

REFR. GRYTA HENNAR…OSV

OG GRYTA KAN FORTEJA OM GODE, SNILLE FAR
SOM GJENNOM TUNGE TIDER SI BØR TIL GRYTA BAR
I SLIT FOR MANGE UNGAR, I SOLSKIN, SOM I FROST
OM DEN SOM SIGNAR MATEN, SJØL FATTIGMANNENS KOST

REFR. GRYTA HENNAR …OSV

EG HØYRER FUGLEN SYNGJA, SOM DENGONG VI VAR SMÅ
OG HIMLEN ER DEN SAME, EVIG UNG OG BLÅ
MEN BLANT DEI SÅRE MINNE, DER ER EI GLEDE STOR
FOR GUD HAR PLANTA BLOMAR KRING GRYTA HENNAR MOR

REFR. GRYTA HENNAR ..OSV

Charlie's new Sweater!

I can't resist blogging my great niece and her sweater that I made her. (my mother had to help me finish though, because she was growing so fast! But I did most of it.)

Stories from the War

We know many people who were children during World War II. One person who experienced the war as a child is a Sami woman we know.
She told us about the Nazis who were in her village. One of the Nazi officers was a professor who took lots of pictures of them; he photographed them face on, and took profile shots, then he measured their heads in all directions. The little girls thought he was a very strange man because one Sunday they got dressed up in their best clothes and went to visit him and explained that now he could take their picture if he wanted. They pointed to his camera and tried to explain to him, but he did not respond. In return the little girls decided that they would never let him photograph them again. The next time he came to their house with his camera and all the other strange stuff he had dangling around his neck, the two little girls ran and hid under the stabur, (a storage house for food).
He also had big dogs which he brought with him when he came to look for an escaped prisoner. The children had seen how he had taken a prisoner whose hands were tightly and painfully tied up. This man was was taken away to another unknown place by soldiers. Because of this the children were afraid of the professor.
The Sami people were also in danger of being exterminated by the Nazis. Our friend's 4 older siblings (2 brothers and 2 sisters) were all called in by the Nazis to serve in the army. One by one they silently disappeared, first the older brother, then a few months later the younger brother, after a little while the sisters silently vanished without a word of explanation. Somehow everybody "knew" that they'd escaped to Sweden, but the explanation the parents gave to the authorities who came to conscript the children was that they were in the mountains with the reindeer. The officers did not believe them and the parents were arrested for a week. During this time the professor was away, but when he returned he backed up the parent's story of the children's whereabouts. So he wasn't all bad, says our friend.
When the war was over she was 10 years old. At that time it was not common for the Sami to learn to read. The Sami have their own language and did not speak Norwegian. Neither her grandparents nor her parents had learned to read. When she left home for boarding school for the first time her older sister was full of good advice:
First the teacher will ask you what your name is, you have to tell him your name, then he will ask you how old you are, then you have to say this, and he will ask you if you are glad to be at school, you have to tell him yes.
A teacher meet the students when they arrived to the large 2 story building. It was the first time the little girl had ever seen such a big house. As they walked along to the school the teacher began to talk to the little girl who walked along in between the teacher and her big sister. The first question was a different one than the poor little girl had been expecting, and since she did not understand Norwegian she told him what her name was. He sister poked her and said, oh how stupid you are! The conversation continued in this way, and her big sister kept poking her and telling her she was doing it all wrong. Our little friend was crushed and ran to find a place to hide where she cried and cried and imagined that the teacher was telling all the other students about the very stupid little girl who had arrived at their school. Finally a cleaning lady who was Sami came and spoke to the little girl and comforted her.
Her first year in school she learned to parrot the texts because a schoolmate who she shared a room with taught her to memorize the words on the page. The next year she was not sent to school, but the year after that there was a place for her in school and this time they had a young teacher who also was Sami, and he explained the words to her in Sami. Then she began to learn and loved school and when school was over she cried because there was so much more she wanted to learn.