I am a fifth generation Minnesotan with German Lutheran and Norwegian roots. My maternal and paternal families have lived in southwestern Minnesota over 120 years. A part of my heart has always been taken by the stories of the life my ancestors made as immigrants and farmers on the prairies. I feel that this world is slipping away. I hope that the writing I do will help preserve some of the time and place they knew and shared with me and that this writing will be an example of preserving personal and local story to contribute to the larger history of Minnesota and of our world.
My interest in this heritage inspired a legacy trip to Poland that led to this prose poem.
Genealogy
I worked. I shoveled into the piles of family history. I filled a wheelbarrow with the story of a farm, of leaving Prussia. The immaterial labor of looking for names, dates, and places. And to move the stories, from one generation to another, rolling them forward so the children will know the labors of their great-grandparents —Edward and Emma, Peter and Elizabeth. Trundling from one pile to another. It takes a shovel to dig up, to put the blood back into facts of birth, death, place and fragments of stories.
I travelled. Flower baskets hung from street lights in Poznań, the bright pinks and oranges of million bells overflowing. The lilacs, white, light purple, and dark plum bloomed along the road, skirted farm fields. Kasia said cemeteries were hedged in lilacs so you would know where they were. That didn’t help us find the old German Lutheran cemetery of Rogasen. The sign named it a lapidarium—which meant it is no longer considered a place to maintain with weeds pulled, stones upright. Here the iron fences, traditional Polish markings, were visible in May, early in the growing season. By July, the grasses, so full of themselves, will cover all these graves. The best time to visit here would be the heart of the winter. Not now with the nettles rising, the mosquitoes swarming my bare legs. I was wearing a dress, about to go to the church my great-grandmother attended.
I sat there. I imagined her, as if I didn’t need to imagine. Could feel her saying See for me what I saw and can no longer see. Love for me. Witness what I never believed could happen. To be back here, me in you.
Inspired by Piotr Szyhalski’s ‘Permanent Labor.’
Originally published as a blog post for the Loft.