Monday morning a week ago, I took a little trip to Sacramento and picked Mom up from the Amtrak station. She hadn't been here for awhile, so, before the cooler weather sets in, we thought the timing of a visit would be just about right.
Of course, I had a wild and stimulating itinerary planned for the week. For example, some of the time was spent with her sitting and perusing a lot of old portfolio photos (my art stuff) that she hadn't seen, going back quite a few years (while I sat and did some computer work). There were old stage productions, work done for churches, camps and conferences, plus glass work and signage. Only a mom would be so patient as to turn every page and look at every photo. Then, we sat (some more) and I showed her my more recent work in the computer portfolio. We were exhausted!
Another focus was on a small box of archival family albums and postcards I found as I was transferring it all out of cardboard boxes (standard storage around here) a couple of weeks ago. I had forgotten the identities of those in the pictures (or why I had them), but they were old and I needed her to fill me in on the names and relationships. One album turned out to be the family photos of the grandmother/grandfather figures in her early life. Jenny-mama and Otto-seta were a Finnish immigrant couple (the names of whom I have heard all my life) in the LA Finnish-American community (of which Mom's family was a part), and stood in for the extended family she never knew who were left behind back in the old country. Mom has an amazing long-term memory and I heard quite a few of the seemingly endless archive of stories she can access about her early life in Garvey Acres, now part of South El Monte in Southern California.
Another album contained the photos and postcards of a Finnish woman my sister and I remember well from our own childhoods. Her name was Esther Heiskanen and she was a friend of our grandparents and she never married or had children, which is how my grandparents came into possession of her pictures. Terry and I had always regarded her as a bit, shall we say, odd-ish. Her postcards, however, some bought as souvenirs, some actually sent through the mail, are vintage 1920s to 50s and journaled her travels and relationships. Intrinsically interesting because of their age, they're mostly written in Finnish, so the information I can glean about her is quite limited. Mom's Finnish (it was her first language) is quite rusty after so many decades, but she can make out at least the gist, if the writing is at all legible...
...which helped us figure out the contents of the rest of the box, which was a large stack of ancient postcards (maybe 100 or more?), the addressees of which were that of my grandparents around the time they were married in New York City in 1926. As close as we can figure, it's most of the correspondence between them during that time, plus some from as early as 1916 to Gramma, Annie Stranden, before she came to the US in 1921 (at age 21). Speaking of 1921, we found a letter with an official seal from the pastor of a Finnish Congregational of Brooklyn vouching as to the character of Annie's uncle, who had emmigrated several years earlier and who wanted to sponsor her to come to the US, which she did, of course. Grampa came over in '23 from a different area in Finland after which they met in New York. That same pastor christened Mom in 1928.
So, we had some fun perusing some of the cards and that helped me realize that I need to get them translated to fully appreciate them. I'm not going to be learning Finnish any time soon, I can tell you.
Other activities of the week were going out to eat, attending the Thursday Night Street Fair in Grass Valley and watching movies. We watched "Little Miss Sunshine" at home and went to Sierra Cinemas to see "Julie & Julia", both films highly recommended.
All in all, we had a very nice week and somehow survived all the physical activity. We put her on the train back to Fresno around 5pm Friday (though we shaved it pretty thin, timing-wise--forgot to allow for traffic) and she called around nine, having arrived safely home. Next time we'll tackle the old family slides, if we can work up the stamina...
