Category: Memorial Day

  • Above the Horizon: Part the Last

    a My great-aunt Ethel and Grandma Dorothy as girls in Montan The Saturday after his mother’s memorial service, my Finnish father, who would regularly answer the direct question of “What are you thinking right now?” with “I don’t know,” talked to me about his life. As it turns out, he was more than just my…

  • Above the Horizon III

    In the hour before the church service that would publicly memorialize my grandmother, we immediate family members left the windy cemetery and headed back to her bungalow, where she had lived since moving off the ranch more than thirty years earlier. As we all rattled around in her house, eating bars and leaning against her…

  • Neither Hero Nor Saint

    In 1906, my maternal grandfather picked up a typewriter and threw it at the principal of his high school. He was 14. Shortly thereafter, he left his hometown in southern Minnesota and made his way to Montana, where he found work as a “hired hand”–a cowboy, in more romantic terms. With the help of his…