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By Root 866 0

loved the time with those women. I did talk about the trip then, I did.” She nodded her head. “Maybe I wasn’t honoring Ole’s death by doing that, but he was gone and my memories weren’t.” She leaned toward me, whispered. “I started writing things down. I have many, many pages. I work on it late at night in my painting room. They never bother me there. Once, when I wrote of our crossing at the Dale trestle, Thelma came in to play in my upstairs room. She likes to do that. Such a sweet child who so misses her father, just as I did at her age. I was so enthused from remembering that I put my pen down on the yellow pages and looked up and said to her, ‘Thelma, don’t ever forget my story.’

“ ‘I won’t, Grandma,’ she said, and she hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. But maybe one day she’ll get curious. Then the pages will be there in the bottom of my trunk. And this scrapbook of yours, that’ll be there too.” She reached for my hand and held it. “What a treasure! What a treasure!” She turned the pages, let her fingers scroll down the articles. “Oh, a dried sunflower. Yes. I’d forgotten that.” She read further. “Oh, and when the Indians in Utah looked inside our bags that time and we had to show them what that curling iron was for, remember that?” We laughed. “The tramp and your pepper-box gun and how the papers called our bicycle outfits Weary Waggles after the comic hobo!” She laughed outright then. “Oh, and here’s the mention of our modeling in Chicago and all the shoes and hats we went through!”

Her face lit up and I realized how much I’d missed talking of that trip. Olea and Louise listened, but it was nothing like the shared experience with one who’d participated. She read more, then said, “There’s nothing wrong with remembering our story, is there, Clara?”

“Not a thing,” I told her. “It’s how we remember what it means to be strong. You did it for your family, Mama. You served them as best you knew how.”

“Just as my mother served me when she found Ole for me to marry.”

“And me, when you made me leave my fantasy of Forest Stapleton to find a new life.”

Mama leaned back, closed the book, her eyes shining with happy tears. “Visiting all those places. Being lost. That trestle. Meeting Mary Bryan, the McKinleys. All of it. It was quite a grand adventure, wasn’t it, Clara?”

“It was.”

“We kept those reporters entertained that evening in Minneapolis. We laughed through our tears. But that’s what living looks like, I guess.”

“You kept them entertained, Mother,” I said. This was what I had to give her, a shared memory that nourished and transformed, and she received it. “Every evening that you stood on a stage and spoke, you amazed people. You were a marvel all across the country. I am so proud of you.” I put aside the rightness or wrongness of what had happened those years before and just met my mother where she was.

“Are you?” Mama blinked back tears. She reached for my hand. “Well, you amazed them too,” she said. “You were quite the trooper, my daughter. Such good wisdom shown, every step of the way.”

I leaned back and grinned. “Oh, Mama, I was just along for the walk.”

Epilogue

APRIL 1942

They’d made the arrangements before they had to. Ida accepted Clara’s invitation to live with her in the house Clara owned on West Eighth. It was a Tudor duplex, and Bill and his wife, Margaret, already rented the upstairs. Clara and Ida would share the lower level.

Clara had lived alone these past four years in the Cleveland house, and during that time, Ida accepted her invitations to tea. They’d found an uneasy peace, simply never talking about “that time.” Olea died in 1935 and Louise in 1938. Emma Wells presided over the services for both women, held in their home on Cleveland, and led the graveside services for them as well at Fairmont Cemetery. The two women were buried side by side, and there was an additional plot purchased for Clara. She didn’t assume her family would want her buried with them at Mica Creek.

But now Clara would live again with her sister and brother. Their mother would be buried later in the