THE MAIN CHARACTER
I’ve had two special cousins my whole life and now one is gone. Vivian represented the Floren side of my family and Audrey, the Neset side. Now Vivian has passed and I miss her more than would seem likely since I didn’t spend so very much time with her over the years. But the times we did spend together at her little house on Van Eps or her senior apartment these last years feel rich with connection to family and to story. And make no mistake, Vivi was the main character of her own drama, the almost-relentless teller of her own story. In recent years this sweetest-appearing of little old ladies, declaring modestly ‘oh, I don’t know what to say’ would proceed to say plenty, telling all of her tales over (and sometimes, over) the next hours. Like all of us, Vivi had her strengths and her weakness, but boy, did she love her family and her home on Van Eps and her community of friends, and, in fact, all of Sioux Falls. And now that I think of it, her stories were pretty darn good.
I think of the elders in my small family, most of whom have passed, and how their stories were shaped by a world of immigration, of depression, of small houses on a town street or at the end of the road, on a farm or in the woods. Is it just me or does it seem to you, that the ‘real’ world, the natural world, used to play a bigger role in life whether in town or country? My grandchildren’s lives don’t seem nearly as connected to a street or a town or a farm or a prairie or a forest or a lake. Maybe in a big political historical way, like being of Filipino or Palestinian or Taiwanese or Chilean or Norwegian or Dutch, heritage but it seems less intimate. Probably just me, old person talking like old people have always talked.
Besides, I digress. Vivian was not about heritage particularly although her grandparents on her mother’s side (the Stroms and the Florens) were immigrants, and her state, South Dakota, has big prairie/western/settler heritage. She was intensely about her own life. And did she ever have the past and present of it clearly in her mind. The neighbors over the last ninety years, the hurts of a small girl and anguish of a young woman in a time of so damn few choices for women. Family quarrels and family events. Losses. That little house on Van Eps I keep mentioning. That house was like a garment, like her coat and pajamas; it added and subtracted pieces of her life, it was truly an extension of Vivi.
❤️you are amazing with your words, capturing perfectly moms inner most connection over the years to self, others, her small town grown large and the home she loved since the age of 5.