When it rained last week, I opened the windows. My daughter Eleanor and I listened to the rain falling on rocks and leaves and pavement outside the window, breathing clean air into our lungs. When Eleanor asked why the earth smells so good after rain, we looked it up on Google. Turns out the smell is a bacteria called geosmin. Toxic for some creatures, but a pleasant smell for us.
My mom tells me that my great-grandmother Hollis Lydia, who my oldest daughter is named after, liked to open her windows too. At night, she would open every window in their woodfloored house in Oakland, California. She did this, my mom says, so that when they woke up in the morning, the house smelled fresh and washed clean.
My mom and her siblings called her Mummi, the Finnish term for grandmother, even though Mummi wasn’t Finnish but her grandchildren were. She was my mom’s dad’s mother. My mom says she loved to go to Mummi’s house as often as she could to escape the poverty stricken home of her parents, where she would sometimes hide under the bed or table while her dad yelled at her mom. When my mom told Mummi this, Mummi’s face turned real serious and she said more to herself than to my mom, “Oh Steve, what’s wrong?”
Mummi’s windows filled the east and west walls so that the front and back yards were like giant paintings, canvassing the trees and sun outside her home. My mom described to me once the Wisteria tree that grew in Mummi’s backyard. Even now I can imagine its cascading purple flowers showering the back wall windows with the way my mom describes it. Mummi planted baby tears instead of grass and collected stones one at a time throughout the years to create walking paths that wound around the house. Redwood trees bordered her backyard and a plum tree shaded the brick flooring she laid as a large patio area. Art students from the nearby arts and crafts school used to come and sketch her yard. Mummi herself was a sketch artist and a potter with a talent for interior and garden design. I found a clipping of her home once in a local newspaper. I learn from the way my mom describes the yard that my mom’s own love of art and colors are inherited from Mummi, from my great-grandmother whom I’ve never met.
I’ve visited Mummi’s house, though, long after she died, after the backyard collapsed into a tangle of vines and weeds and dead leaves. Mummi’s husband, who we called Ukki, Finnish for grandfather, remained in that house for years and when we’d visit, he’d give us chocolate ice cream bars, then called Eskimo pies, which are now called Edy’s Pies to correct the derogatory term. After exploring the upstairs rooms and creaking doors and hiding places, we used to color with broken crayons on construction paper on the table near the windows overlooking the backyard while we waited for mom to finish her visit.
I thought of coloring in my great-grandparents’ house the other day while I sketched. I’ve been sketching again, this time with an Apple pencil on my iPad. There is something about using my hands to create something that settles me into my own body, makes me feel a sense of ease, a sense of home, a word I use to mean “I belong here.” Though I don’t consider myself a visual artist—drawing feels more like a hobby than it does a skill, at least now—creating things with my hands feels primal and instinctual, familiar in memory, or perhaps DNA.
I come from a long line of artists who used their hands to create. Mummi’s mother, Josephine, was a seamstress. My maternal grandmother, Laila Synnöve, who my youngest is named after, was a gardener, pianist, weaver, and knitter. My paternal grandmother, Bea, was a canner and crafter. Her mother Florence was a baker and cook. My grandfathers were painters, farmers, mechanics, carriage builders, broom makers, chess players, and clarinetists. My dad is a bassist and guitarist, my mother a visual artist, drawing and oiling.
Biologists describe how the egg that helps create you developed in your mother’s ovaries at the same time your mother developed as a fetus inside your grandmother’s womb. Our maternal grandmothers carried a part of us before our mothers were born, before we were born. Our grandparents were carried by their grandmothers too. That my first cells shared physical space with my maternal grandma who we called Mana intrigues me. A part of me flew on a plane to Lahti, Finland where Mana birthed my mom, where Mana sat, too, with her mom, at the edge of the lake, eating raspberries right off the bush or steeped in cream. Perhaps my grandma’s vibrato and her mother’s organ playing vibrated my cells long before I developed ears to hear them.
I think, too, how it is not just our DNA ancestors that live on with us, but the people who adopt us into their lives, engulfing us into their words and mannerisms and expressions; their names and jokes and passions for Sibelius or banana cream pie or Jerry Seinfeld. My mom’s famous broccoli cheese casserole is from a recipe she got from her sister’s college roommate. My own middle name, Tuulikki, which I share with my mom, is after Mana’s childhood friend who lived down the street. I think, too, of the LDS missionaries who showed up at Mana’s childhood home in Lahti with a Book of Mormon not yet translated to Finnish. My grandmother, only sixteen years old, hid in the hallway and secretly listened to them talk to her mother and sister. She was baptized two years later.
The first snow of the season came early this year, before the leaves fell from the trees. I took my three daughters up Hobble Creek Canyon in Springville, Utah where we live, a town my great x 4 grandfather Jacob Houtz and his polygamous wives, including his fourth wife Anna, who I’m a descendent of, came and settled with other Mormons in the mid 1800s. Anna is buried here in Springville in a separate cemetery than her husband, who is buried next to his first wife, Lydia, on the other side of town. To be a polygamous wife at all is its own peculiar loneliness I imagine, but to be the fourth? How forgotten the fourth of anything is--the fourth place recipient, the fourth grade, the fourth kiss, the fourth bite, the fourth book you ever read. How few fourths we remember.
Anna is buried next to her three sons, and on her headstone, she is described as “Mother.” I find myself fascinated by this inscription and the surrounding ones. Imagine one line to describe all your life. I hope mine isn’t “She complained…a lot.” The line attributed to Mana’s mom, Laila Hellevi, is, “She always said ‘I will die soon,’” and my mom mimics her in a slow, imitated Finnish accent, even though Laila lived for decades after she started saying this.
I find the inscriptions remarkably basic–“Wife”, “Daughter”, “Father”. The simplicity of each inscription moves me. All these people defined by their relationships, dictated by the people willing to and able to bury them. Each headstone says the same thing: “She was my wife,” “He was my dad,” “She was my baby.” Who we attach to, who we surround ourselves with becoming our whole life’s summary.
Jacob is buried not only next to his first wife, but also next to his sister who followed him to Utah. You would never be able to tell their relationship from the headstones because her last name is her husband’s and nothing on either of their headstones indicates a relationship between the two. So many unpronounced secrets in a single graveyard, in a single plot, in one family line.
Something about maintaining that siblinghood–growing up and dying near each other evokes a tenderness toward my great grandfather and great aunt. I think of how I wouldn’t mind being buried alongside my siblings; how of all the people in my life, my siblings will be the people I have known the longest, who knew me before I decided who to be, who remember that fight, that crush, that performance where I lost feedback and sang out of tune, my older brother Dane and I staring into each other’s eyes and laughing in front of a live outdoor audience. Even now, Dane teases me about the fact that when I was in middle school I listened to a Sheryl Crow song on repeat. We laugh at my tendency to squeeze each song to death like the goldfish our younger brother Grant killed with his violent love. Dane, to this day, will listen to his favorite songs sparingly so as not to get sick of them. For someone who has a tendency toward extremism—running till he pukes—he is gentle with the things he holds most dear like a song.
I want to know details like this about my dead. I want them to be real, to be people I can hold onto. When I left Mormonism, I felt disconnected from my own family of origin. Years later, Mormonism still functions as this wedge between us, this ugly, sharp wedge I resent for stabbing my sides and center, yet a wedge they revere. This wedge seems to grow sharper and at odd angles we try to work around, but cannot always. And so I crave family who can know all of me, who I can tell my anger and resentment and loneliness to, who can laugh about my wild stories in familiar sounds. I know so little about my dead, but I assume like we often do, that the dead are better listeners and seers and lovers. We can have the conversations and hugs we never could have with them when they were alive. Even now, I imagine my dead brother understanding non-Mormon me, as if we had never yelled in each other’s faces about prophets. As if all our fights no longer exist now that he is dead.
Historical records show that the early Mormon settlers who came to Springville displaced the Indigenous peoples that lived here and relegated them to an “Indian Farm,” a plot of deprived land at the mouth of the Spanish Fork River. My Mormon ancestors are not named in the records I’ve read, but they participated in this displacement or turned a knowing eye away from it. Either way, they benefited from it. Jacob and Anna’s daughter’s home still stands as a registered historical site in the middle of town. A park named after Jacob exists on Main street where he built the first flour mill of the town before it burned down.
I want to know these details too, what it looks like to claim someone else’s land as your own, to justify it with the name of God. Did they feel the Holy Spirit? Did they lie about feeling it? Were they unsure and chose the interpretation that would support their prophet leader like I did for decades? Were they scared of their own violence, did they suspect they’d been duped too?
I crave the dead, even the horrendous ones. I crave their details and their stories and I want them to crave mine. It is simple, really. I crave more people to love me, and better than the living can. I crave to love the dead too, and better than I love the living. The dead are so easy to love. So easy to forgive. I imagine their sincerest apologies, their pristine understanding. I can connect with the dead because the dead are everything the living can’t be.
When I go long enough without seeing my mom, I feel a tenderness toward her and her essence. And when I go and visit her again, just a fifteen minute drive north to Provo, if she talks of God as if God is Mormonism, my nervous system walks to a metaphorical edge. It is so much easier to love the faraway, the not here, the dead. It is so much easier to see yourself as loving when you love the perfectly dead.
Up the Springville canyon, cottonwood trees, aspen trees, and pine trees scatter along the crooked creek, their red, orange, yellow, green leaves and needles frosted under a thin layer of snow. The creek has not yet frozen, carving its way along the mountain, devouring melting snow. Water is the universal solvent in the sense that it can dissolve more chemicals than any other solvent. It is the magnanimous ancestor of solvents, the solvent with the most outstretched arms, the widest arm span. I’m reminded of a question I engage in often with my daughters:
“How much does mommy love you?”
“This much!” They yell and smile, their arms forming into a circle around their heads. They stand on their tippy toes to accentuate the point. The point being I love them forever.
I cannot remember not loving my girls, though my pregnancies with them and my postpartum depression traumatized me, left me feeling abandoned and resistant to mothering that I was told was supposed to be beautiful. Though I am inclined to snap at them daily, to put their goddamn shoes on, I cannot remember what it was like not to love them—before they existed in human form, as if my whole life they have never not existed. I carried the eggs that would later form them since my earliest days in my mother’s womb. In a way, we have always existed together. Even glimpses of my childhood are tinted with this kindredness. As if every part of my past in some way also includes them. As a child in the backyard by myself, pretending to live with bunnies and squirrels and birds and other rodents in the rocks, I can’t help but envision myself in these memories as my own nine-year-old daughter, Lydia, whose bare feet are often black or stained green with grass. When Eleanor waves to us on the basketball court and cocks her head proudly to the side, I see myself, and I am endeared to her at the same time I am endeared to the parts of myself I have sometimes felt ashamed of.
When Lydia was born, the doctor took her away to scoop the poop out of her nose and lungs. Lydia sometimes gets embarrassed by this fact, that her first breath on this earth was literally full of shit. When they brought her to me for the first time because her heart rate had increased, they placed her on my naked chest, right over my heart. My husband and I watched her heart rate slow and slow until finally, her heart beat in rhythm with mine. My first moments with my first daughter is a moment my body remembers even now as I write, the way she was so distinct, separate, then quickly dissolved into me or I in her if only for a moment.
Could our ancestors feel the same way about us? Do they see us in their memories, see themselves in our lived lives? Do they, like water, dissolve us–feces, heart beats and all–into their stories? See that? She got that from me. She has my eyes, my laugh, my yellow cavity-stricken teeth. Are they endeared to themselves as they are endeared to us?
Of course not all parents and grandparents have loved their posterity well or have even wanted to. Every parent and grandparent has betrayed their posterity in more ways than can be recorded. I can’t recall a time any one of my grandparents, who are now all dead, said my name. There are the kin, like bacteria growing in the rain, who smell inviting to others, but whose toxicity will consume you. But what if death were the great transformer, the healer because it is the ultimate destroyer, of say, even toxins? Could my grandparents know my name now, now that they are dead?
Autumn is a season traditionally associated with remembering and connecting with ancestors and the dead. As the air cools, plants and trees harness their energy deep into their roots in order to store up energy for the winter, a practice many cultures throughout the world have imitated and still do. In Finland where Mana and her ancestors lived, an ancient Finnish pagan tradition for honoring ancestors and the dead was known as Kekri. Kekri comes from the Finno-Ugrian word kekraj, meaning wheel or circle to signal both the end of the harvest season and the beginning of a new year. Anciently, tables filled with food from the harvested crops and slaughtered lamb, breads, porridges, and fish. Placements were arranged for the living and the dead too.
Men dressed up as Kekripukki, a character who wore fur flipped upside down and a mask and goat horns. Women dressed as ghosts in white sheets and white face paint. Children dressed up as spirits or demons and traveled house to house performing plays and jokes for drinks and food, and if anyone turned them away, they broke something. Before pumpkins were ever introduced to Europe, Finns carved turnips and placed candles inside them.
The master of the house, and I imagine my great x 14 grandfather, invited ancestors into the home by pouring ale on the road in hopes that the scent of beer would wake up the dead. The sauna and clean towels and leaf bundles were prepared for the dead as well. The sauna was traditionally thought to connect the living with the underworld. The Finnish word for the steam that rises from the sauna, löyly, refers to the soul of the body in Finnish mythology.
I don’t know if my ancestors’ spirits live on. I don’t know if my dead know me, think about me the way alive humans do, the way I do. I don’t know if they visit me through dreams unrecalled or unrecognized. If they wander the earth the first couple weeks after harvest. Do they care to be remembered? Do they want something from me? Do they want anything for me? I want them to. I imagine the dead who worked so hard just to stay alive, wanting me simply to eat. I imagine them wanting me warm, or rather roasting in a sauna. I imagine them wanting me safe, rested, everything they craved. Have another serving! I imagine my ancient Finnish ancestors, the ancestors who never knew a thing about the Bible or the Book of Mormon, wanting me to dance in circles around a fire, to enjoy a good laugh or a love spell, to witness a growing seed, and of course, to guzzle a mug of vodka. I imagine them overlooking my shoulder while I write about them, while I sketch.
The Finnish word for November, the time when Kekri was often celebrated, and when All Saints Day is celebrated in modern day Finland now, is marraskuu, meaning “the dying month.”
I don’t know if my brother’s spirit lives on in the same human or personality form, the way he still lived after I thought he died when he was four, after my mom pulled me out of my first grade class and we walked along the sunlit hall and she told me that when he fell on the trampoline with me, he burst his eardrum and became completely deaf in his left ear. I thought she meant he died, so realizing she meant deaf was a relief. But after he really died, after I heard right decades later, I felt something about him lingering all over that first week after his death, in a way that split me open and softened me. I felt so sure he was still around I allowed my youngest daughter, Liv, be blessed in our home by her Mormon father and grandfathers and uncles in the hopes that my brother’s spirit might show up and join. I never got the sense he did.
It seems if the dead exist at all, they become excuses and permissions and projections of our deepest desires and yearnings for connection. We construct them into idols out of our own longing and loneliness. It seems they dissolve into us, rather than we in them.
Ancestry is the reason behind Mormon temples where rituals and ordinances are performed on behalf of the dead to tie them to the living, to tie them to the family of God. Without Mormon temples and the religious ordinances performed inside, I was taught, we could not live with our dead family or with God. There’s a frightening Kekri knock on the door: give us your ordinances or we’ll break your family!
I dreaded talk of ancestry and the temple as a Mormon teen. Old, slow talking Sunday School teachers walked us through LDS genealogical databases where we researched dates and places of ancestors to enter into our family trees. As teenagers, we were supposed to save our dead through these dates and temple ordinances. Our dead were supposed to save us too, but only our Mormon ancestors seemed to be the ones who could save us, prompting us to be better Mormons. The ancestors who weren’t Mormon had cultural customs and superstitions or incorrect beliefs that needed correcting in heaven. I was too bored to listen to an old person speak, yet I believed these old people, alive and dead, depended on me for their spiritual lives.
Funny how after leaving Mormonism, it is ancestry I am most drawn to. But the ancestors I am drawn to knowing are not the ancestors I grew up revering. Not the Mormon pioneers who sacrificed their lives and children in the winter wilderness for a prophet who claimed to speak for God, but the ones who never even heard of Joseph Smith, or the ones who fled him.
Mummi, was a direct descendent of James Jesse Strang, one of the men who claimed to be the next Mormon prophet after Joseph Smith’s murder. Most Mormons followed Brigham Young out west after Joseph’s death, but some followed my great x 4 grandfather to Beaver Island in Michigan where some of them still live and revere his teachings and scripture today. James Jesse Strang was shot and killed. His followers were forced off the island and most scattered across North America, including his wives and his son James Phineas, my ancestor. James Phineas fled to Springville, where I live now, and his mother, Sarah Adelia Wright, the fourth polygamous wife of Strang, the wife I’m related to, recorded in her journal, “I know now that no man speaks for God.”
I’m drawn to stories of my ancestors because I’m curious how other people go along, get through this thing we call life. I’ve never seen a woman with my blood loved well. I’ve never seen a man with my blood let himself be loved well. I’ve never seen someone truly free. My ancestors share things like genes or place or interests or ignorance or stupidity. Maybe hidden in their stories they have something for me based on our shared weaknesses. I want more creative ways to live life, more beautiful ways, more artistic and imaginative ways, ways that swell and burst inside me and flow like a ravenous mountain stream, or a Finnish family devouring food seven times a day on the last day of harvest.
My mom found a stray kitten in a pile of dirt in Mummi’s backyard once. My mom picked up the kitten, started stroking it, when all of a sudden, the kitten hissed and scratched her. My mom threw the kitten to the ground. Mummi scooped up the kitten and when my mom started to protest because of the heartlessness of the creature, Mummi said, “Oh baby doll, it’s just frightened, that’s all.”
Mummi ended up taking the kitten to the veterinarian. She told my mom later that the kitten had a beebee stuck in its skull. What my mom thought was dirt was really dried blood.
My mom’s dad was Mummi’s only child. Steve, who we grandkids called Papo, had always been taller and bigger than the other kids his age. He grew to be six feet and six inches. They called him “Fatty” and other names, teased as an outsider and outcast. My mom suspects he had autism and a mood or personality disorder which went undiagnosed and untreated throughout his life. My dad, who often fought with his father-in-law,—I remember them yelling in each other’s faces in the parking lot at the Portland, Oregon LDS temple about whether or not God existed (my dad believed God existed, Papo did not)—remembers watching Ukki chastise Papo, then a grown man, over a small detail until Papo retreated, slouched, into the corner. My dad said it was the one time he felt compassion for Papo.
Yet Papo was a clarinetist, an artist, and a poet, too. At one point he was accused for plagiarism for his original work: “Lumbering hippos to the mud,” the famous (in our family) poem of his goes. He attended college and majored in economics. On his second date with my grandmother, he brought her to his chess club so she could watch him play. But soon after they married, after they had their first child--my aunt Satu who wouldn’t attend his funeral--my grandfather’s life took a downward turn. He couldn’t keep his door-to-door encyclopedia sales job. Nor his substitute teacher job or graveyard security job. He had many talents, but figuring out how he could apply them would be his life’s endeavor. He didn’t know what to do, where to work, and never settled into anything. His mental illness grew worse and with that, the house my mother grew up in increased with dirt, mold, mildew, unwashed dishes and clothes. I still have memories of walking as a young child into their Hayward house, witnessing the tile floors that were unmopped, the grout infused with grime. I remember the smell of sour milk and rotting vegetables.
On my living room wall hangs a picture of a black gnarled oak tree with leafless branches. It is Mummi’s tree. I don’t know if Mummi drew it herself or if one of the art students gave it to her. I’ve wondered about this black tree and why it called out to Mummi. I recall now that Mummi’s four year-old younger brother died of an illness when she was a kid, and her little sister Gail died by suicide as a young adult. I have read Gail’s suicide note. Seen the slurred, incoherent scrawling at the end of the note, signaling the drugs and alcohol kicking in. Mummi saved that letter. And my mother saved that letter because Mummi saved that letter. This letter exists somewhere still, though I’m not sure which relative possesses it now, and I think how it exists because an older sister found the last moments of a life not scary or ugly or shameful, but holy. This letter is proof of a time when a sister still existed. Her pain is worthy to hold even still.
Perhaps a black barren tree is black like the color of dilated pupils, like the color of intoxication, like the color of a little brother’s marble headstone. Perhaps black is a reminder of the space between us, the longing that fills the gap between the living and the dead, the color of the sky on the night your kid sister died.
A juniper tree grows near the trail along the mountainside, its gnarled trunk only a few feet taller than me. I smell it, then break off a small twig for an art project. The twig warms in the car ride home, the snow melting and saturating the braided needles with moisture. When we get home, the twig smells even stronger, and for the rest of the afternoon, it scents our kitchen.
I draw a tree for me. I draw a western juniper tree growing out of rock, sketching every branch and needle and berry. I think of the way a juniper’s bark peels and strips like corn husk in a colonized land. The way some branches claw up and out, needleless, barren, exposed like an open window, like bacteria in the rain. I think of the trees of my childhood and my mother and my grandparents and my Mummi and the great grandparents I may never know who passed down both an ability to tear down trees and burn them and a longing to witness trees and sketch them. I think of sketching with their hand movements, their rhythms and pauses, the strength of their forearms holding an axe mid-swing right before the cut burrowed into my earliest cells.
And after, through an open window, I hear my girls scream at a spider on the driveway. Liv smashes it with her foot without so much as a blink of remorse, causing Lydia, who is sensitive to all living and non-living creatures like her stuffed animals, to cry. I think of Mummi holding a daddy longlegged spider in her hand and showing it to my mom–pointing out its long legs, joints, round body, and how it moved, her saying, what my mom quotes often, “Isn’t that something?”
*artwork of Mummi by Dennis Anderson
Reading this, I thought you might like Maud Newton's recent book, Ancestor Trouble. I suspect that it will resonate on many levels.