A Mystery Unraveled

Only now, years after her passing, am I finally getting a closer look at the ambitious, liberated, free-spirited, adventurous woman gave birth to me over eighty years ago. Then forgot about the role she was supposed to play in my life after that.

Up until this point, with the rare exception of a couple of old black and whites, all I had to go on to retrace my mother’s life story was a series of hand-written notes detailing some of the sequences in her life growing up. It was a chronical of her experiences from youth to old age. Unfortunately, the notes were written later on in her life and was rife with errors, misstatements, and voids that she had purposely created to leave out specific parts of her story.

Then one day my sister, Marlene, met a cousin who had a treasure-trove of old pictures, many of which include our mother in her youth growing up on the farm. It suddenly opened up a whole new insight into our mother’s adolescence and young adult period. From the cars to clothes to rural surroundings it was a glimpse into a past long since shut dark by time and old age.

Closer examination of the pictures along with her own scribbled notes provided some clarity in my mother’s early life. There were pictures of her with her mother with whom she was never close. My grandfather whom my mother adored was there. There was her brother, Frank, a man wrapped in mystery, who died relatively young in his thirties.

Farm life around the turn of the century was a hard-scrabble life; twenty-four hours a day. Horse power provided the engine to harvest crops, move machinery and take folks to town. Our grandfather was the first in Sterns County to have a horseless carriage, one of the few in all of Minnesota at the time.

Fortunately, a few of the pictures had hard to-read-scribbles on the back that named names and connections. There were snapshots of mom’s close girlfriend, Delta, with whom she shared many adventures in and around Saint Martin, Minnesota and the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Union depot always took my mother and her siblings back to the farm.

Our mother’s time, spent in the Twin Cities, was chronicled by pictures of girlfriends gathered on Summit Avenue where they all worked as domestics. Then there was an afternoon stroll over the Mendota Bridge with a friend.

There was a gap of time, sans photographs, between our family restaurant; ‘Frenchy’s Eats, our first rental on Smith Avenue, the six-plex we lived in among the DPs (displaced refugees from World War Two) and finally a real home my mother built herself on Randolph Avenue.

Unfortunately, there are only a couple of pictures of the house she built on an empty lot. I know she had the basement excavated by a contractor. Then professional framers came in to construct the walls and roof. After that, she and her brother, somehow managed to build the rest of the house from the frames on up.

There are only a few pictures of my mother and her new friend, Erwin, a recent widower. She met him at one of the many dance halls in the Cities and they eventually got married. My sister thinks there may be more photographs coming from that cousin. That would be a good thing. Any image would help in filling in the gaps of this mysterious, fascinating woman whom I called Mom a long long time ago.