It's been a sad, strange couple of weeks. The night before Valentine's Day my grandma Bohman died, the last of that generation, almost ten years exactly after my grandpa had passed away. She died sitting alone at the dinner table, my uncle Mark, who lived with her and was easily the closest to her, was at work until late that night. When the news had finally filtered down to my parents, they called me--it was after 10, Les was asleep and I was trying to finish her Valentine's Day card--my mom talking first, then my dad. He had had a strained relationship with his mother, not unpleasant, but certainly not close, and there was a lot left unresolved between them. Even if she had lived another ten years though, I don't think either of them would really have come to face it, thanks to the ingrained stolidity and amazing capacity to ignore that comes from our Scandanavian and especially Midwestern farmdwelling roots. All I could do was say "yeah" in a quieted disbelief as my dad's voice cracked a little when he said it was tough to no longer have parents, but at least now she was with my grandpa. (Normally I shy away from those thoughts, the nice constructed stories meant to gloss over the absence or the hurt, but this time I didn't mind believing it, even knowing it was a story I had made for myself, because for her sake I wanted it to be true). Then my dad said that she had also died the way she would have wanted, still living independently in the house she had shared with my Grandpa for over 30 years, and that my sister and I should remember that when he and my mom started to get old. He actually said that we should just let them "rot" at Serotso (our jestingly named property in Washington). I could her my mom squeal "H!" in the background, but it was great to hear my dad laugh.

A week ago I was sitting in my grandma's house, surrounded by old pictures, stereocards, and even a Proustian magic lantern that I had found while looking through the den with my cousins, and I was reading a book called "A Landscape of Ghosts", a set of pictures and essays devoted to the ruined, strangely beautiful remnants of the old farming Midwest, that too often nostalgic time from the 1850s through the second World War characterized by bright red barns and shiny tractors. My dad grew up in its denouement: as a boy he had spent summers with my great-Grandpa Rueben on the family farm, although it was really my grandfather, who had gone to college and joined the Army Corps of Engineers during WWII, that had marked the change--he was the first not to farm the land that had slowly been acquired for what next year will be officially 150 years. (We're now in the process of selling the workable stretches of land to a nice guy and his family who are looking for some property of their own... but we'll hold on to the woodland areas and especially the grove my dad planted one summer with his own grandfather). The book's photos of ruined barns could have easily been the one of my great-grandparents, since fallen into disrepair under and then after the last tenants. In a few months, once the property changes hands, those buildings--the old house where my grandfather was born (in the same rope bed that both his father and grandfather first took breath, and which now sits in my parents' garage)--will become a practice exercise for the local fire department to do a controlled burn. But the history of that community just over the Illinois border, and of the town of Cedar Rapids where my mom and dad first met, where my grandpa Carlson threw himself behind the Civil Rights movement as a pastor within a grudging and skeptical congregation when they first moved there in 1963, and where I watched my grandfather pass away only to return for the first time in ten years to say goodbye to my grandma, that history saturates those places. My grandma was a peculiar fountainhead of family and local knowledge, and going through her things made me realize how little I knew about those pasts, how little I had asked when I had the time. There's a lot more to the trip and to the past few weeks, but I can't do it justice at the moment, or probably ever.

I'll try to post a few pictures once I transfer them onto my computer, to try give you all some visuals. And as a side note, I've started to get letters back from grad schools, and right now I'm 2 out of 5. Good enough for Cooperstown, but poor enough to kill business at a fledgling gourmet restaurant.